Written by: Hannah Murray
Winner of the 2026 Aetna Prize for Creative Nonfiction
The sun hangs high in the sky when our car escapes narrowly between gods closing stone hands. A speedy Red Ford slips between mountainous fingers, car darting in, out, and over the seven rock ridges that encircle our small fishing village like arms, cradling this last piece of Eden.
Urris, Inishowen, is one of the most isolated places on Earth. It’s a deep windswept valley set off the coast of the wild Atlantic, on a peninsula ringed by mountains, connected tenuously to the island by a small strip of alpine land, in a county cut off from the rest of Ireland by an international border. Because the roads were built before the country was torn apart, the R238 is the only road out of the Inishowen Peninsula. Built by the British, it runs through English occupied Derry for a reason. Granda says that an Englishman can make anywhere into a prison.
But at 10 the world seems so far beyond this little red car and my family safe within it. Laughter catches light against the wind, loud, and boastful with pride at our daring escape; and the grin that breaks wide across my face can only be classified as impish.
Cousin Paula hoots as the car takes flight down the Mountain Pass, bar rising on a speedometer nobody checks as the wheels catch once, twice, and then the car becomes airborne. For three seconds, flying high in the sky. It is a breathless exhilaration, warm sun against hands waving wildly out of windows, eyes wide and arms punching the sky. For three seconds we are lawless things of wings that know no man nor border.
A beat up country car with more children then seats – Ireland’s national bird.
“That’s so fast!” It is Brendan’s breathy exclamations that break through the laughter and music. At ten, he is only five months my junior and a stone heavier – which makes his presence on my squashed legs nearly intolerable. He speaks highly and quietly in nervous motions, and it has become somewhat of a sport of mine to wind him so.
My hand reaches out to Paula’s shoulder in the driver seat. “That’s craic – Do it again!!” I shout to be heard over youthful exuberance and Dolores O’Riordan’s tinny voice catching on the breeze. We’d have to go back ‘round the mountain but she’d do it I’m sure – Paula is, after all, savage craic. The eldest of the cousins, she is unbearably cool. 16 years old and armed with hoop earrings, turquoise nail polish and a learners permit – she’s basically an adult.
“Don’t you dare!” Brendan shouts, offended by my forward lurch, which displaced him onto Éabha sitting next to us; who’s pinned Lilly and Oisin against the wall in a clumsy escape attempt. We fall like dominoes, five familial freckled kids on a tacky bench seat meant for two, spilling across each other.
“Who’ll ye’ll tell? The Guards?” I crow. And the ensuing laughter is enough to shame him squarely. The joke is implicit, the closest Garda Síochána is 40 minutes from here – these lands of ours are lawless. They are free.
But Brendan after quiet contemplation gets close in my ear. “I’ll tell me Ma” He says – the prick – and that is enough to shame the whole car silent. Where there are no Guards, there are Ma’s, and they rule with far stricter fists.
The Cranberries continue warbling on the three working speakers left in the car, something about dreams and change that float away in the wind. The half remembered words on my mouth like whispers as I occupy myself observing the volleyed argument from front to back. An overlapping chatter of competing voices and stories, the prize here’s not so much the content of the conversation but rather the control of it. This is my first and best sport, the flow of conversation; when to laugh, when to nod, and when to seize the moment for myself. In a craggan land these stories are our life blood, a way to drown out the relentless wind and the roar of the waves as they crash against the rocks. To focus on a guiding voice, grasp onto something if only for a moment in the wild of the world. Words glide on my tongue like sweetened tea, honey-stuck between my teeth. My family tells stories and my lungs expand in my chest like the anticipation of a someday. There is a bird in the back of my throat, wings still folded in the wet-dark, mottled feathers still forming. My silent songbird is growing, already a hum if not a melody. A someday-song.
Lilly says something, perched half on the bench seat, and the rest of us have to duck her flailing hands, falling over ourselves in the process. Her long brown hair catch light in the window and the strands whip against my face. The joy of this car is contagious, the electric hum of family that inflates itself inside me, an addictive kind of pressure.
And it is the excitement also, that leaves me restless and grinning. We are on a mission. Thirty Pounds of foreign English currency between us to buy new bike tyres in the city, and enough left over for a fish and chips. It is not my first time going to Derry, but it’ll be the first time any of us cross the border so close to Marching season.
To young and immature, we have only ever seen it through the distant fuzz of Telly screens. The orange cancerous tide that takes Derry by storm every June. The English Protestants marching through the streets in garish tigre orange uniforms, banging about on drums and bagpipes and the doors of catholic homes and businesses with sticks as thick as fists. Doin it just to prove they can. The way the whole world goes still like rabbits in traps, land drumming a beat beneath my feet, a fearful staccato like bullets, and the adults walking around with the strangest glint in their eyes – like they’ve lost their cotton tails. And of course, that final fearful night that ends in the burning effigies of towering wooden Catholics. You can taste the ash in the air after, on our faraway farms, where the fires are nothing but a distant glow on the horizon. It coats the leaves of bushes, the white of your church shoes and Grannies’ good curtains. It spares nothing and no one. The wind carries the violence here – the earth don’t know borders.
July 13th is the second ash wednesday of the year for peacefire babies. Us children born after it was decided that the fight for freedom had a far higher cost than expected, and that it would all be much more convenient for everybody if we could stop fighting, and the poor could sort it out quietly amongst themselves. But our rage is inherited, the violence is in our blood, and wars don’t end with a signed paper, the same way a country doesn’t end with some lines in the dirt.
I think we’re all a bit like the ash, the afterglow. Heat and danger still present where the fires have been smothered, still kindling below the surface.
But it’s beyond me now, nestled safe as I am in this unstoppable car cutting from coast to coast. The world is changing but that seems to matter less in the face of Lilly’s laughter. The mirror of Oisin’s crooked grin, so similar to my own, and the way Éabha hums sweetly to the music and the song sinks inside my bones and finds a home there. Something to be savoured, stored safe and bought out again in the dark nights. In that cold Connecticut house across an ocean where I am among family but not friends and loneliness threads a weary pulse against my neck. A rope dragging me back to the mountains my heart knows are home.
I am free here, we have been entrusted with this mission, so close to July’s twelfth night, and I know this means we are growing up. That this errand is merely the first step into adulthood, into independence and the ability to exert control over my own life. There is a world beyond this valley and I intend to seize it.
I have lucked myself onto this all-important day trip, having been at Oisin’s by matter of chance when it was decided that his bike wasn’t salvageable, and the oldest of the cousins might be made responsible for the trip. I stood by the car while this was agreed, hands in my pockets, and did my very best to look small and sad.
Of the cousins, I am the floater. With Granny in London, and Mum and Da cross an American ocean, I’ve been passed from house to house all summer like a class pet, or a particularly well loved piece of tupperware. I have made this change an art form. My movements are nomadic and sporadic, choosing a house and a bed solely upon the residents dinner plans, and making the same selection at breakfast. My clothes are spread across houses, my shoes forgotten in an uncle’s garage and my school books in the living room of a second cousin I can’t remember the name of. While my family shakes so wildly, thrashing like a tree caught in the throes of a storm. I learn to leave pieces of myself everywhere. Little things to say I was here, I was here, I was here.
But here is my secret, the thing I can’t say but know is true nonetheless: I don’t mind. I know, even now with what little I know of the world that it sounds lonely. That my school mates have been told to be nice to me, that much of the world will look at me and only ever see a wild parentless child. A little girl yearning for her mother. And yes, it sounds lonely- and it can be – the nights where I curl up alone under the eaves, and there aren’t enough warm blankets in the world to keep the wet-wind out and the damp chill from creeping inside my bones. When grief is alive inside me, not for the family I’ve been separated from, but the one I want and will never have.
But there is so much love here, in this land and the people on it. Constant love, patient love. It doesn’t burn hot like in prosperous America, half soft sunshine and half iron brand. The love here is hard won and enduring. Being nobody’s daughter means I am everyone’s child. That I will always have a house, if not a home, and I am compelled only by the direction my own feet take me. It means permissions to enter British territories become something of an optional courtesy, and the oldest of the cousins might bring me along cheerily for their own purposes.
Despite being young and awkward, I am a commodity in these few hot summer weeks. When our world becomes restless with fear and the country tenses for a civil war long since past – and not yet finished. It is this month where my place of birth makes me a guaranteed passenger on any trip to store, movie or music. My American birth, and sporadic Connecticut residence, is as good as a free pass across the…
“Border cross! Who has the passports?”
The music is still thumping in the speakers but it feels strange now, in this still line of weary cars. With no wind to steal it away it blares, loud and unnatural, and the red paint of the car glints bright against the sun. So similar to the red of Grandad’s birding targets before he shoots them out of the air.
The small British guard shed ahead protrudes from the earth in an unnatural slant. Nothing more than some painted plywood and nails, the structure itself can’t be more temporary than the young, twenty-something soldiers assigned to it.
As tenuous and temporary as the ‘peace’ everyone fears will end.
It’s not always like this, there are days in the winter when the roads are clear and our speedy red car could slip through unaccosted – but we were prepared; the soldiers are always here come time for the Marches and it’s worse than ever this year. A referendum looking like it’s going to tear the already fractured country in two. Like we’re all just sitting on top of a wall, waiting for the wind from London to decide where we’ll fall. It’s been bad and even as I spread myself through the valley, I know well enough to keep my passport tucked safely in the pocket of my white school shirt. At Eleven, I keep my passport on me as a matter of course in Derry. Eleven is too old for an Irish child to be out and about without identification. Eleven, is when the English soldiers turn their weary eyes to you.
The Blue book I hand to Paula is our golden ticket. They’ve been known, this time of year, to turn groups of school kids away at the border. Fearful of the trouble they could stir up in a city that sits on such deep religious faultlines, holding its breath for that final violent night to pass without incident – it never has.
As bad as it is for us in Leenan, we are among family. Beyond our mountains the world seems poised to tear itself apart and do so gladly.
But my passport is an American Blue, not British Blood, or Irish Scarlett, with a gold eagle standing erect in our defence. They will not turn us away, not with my Blue-Eagle book and my ‘Maybe-American’ accent.
The car pulls slowly through the growing line. Theoretically only suspicious cars are stopped and searched, so, of course, they all are. And who are we to refuse?
The soldiers know this, and the fancy Irish government in the south allows it, so afraid of my proud people, and the trouble we could cause if allowed to move freely. It’s why the checkpoint is here this year. To stop us coming and going. In their issued boots and caps the soldiers here guard in and out.
To them, anyone in this line could be a terrorist.
Our car rolls in and the gates come down in the back and front of it- trapping us in metal jaws – and a red faced man appears in the window.
“Where are you coming from?” the man shouts, despite being a total of ten inches from Paula’s face. I ignore the conversation in favour of watching the other guard coming from behind.
Head bent at an awkward angle, I don’t dare move for a better look, but crane my neck to catch a glimpse in the rear mirror.
There’s a second soldier, his mud splattered boots pacing up and down the car, a scar now in the land, from his shoes digging in and disrupting it. The leash in his hand is lax with confidence, sniffin-dog trailing after, nose close to our red-target car. Searching, searching, like it can smell our secrets.
Brendan eyes the dog warily, and I shift back into him. There are dozens of dogs on our farms, but not like these ones, which bite hard and nasty. In this, me and Brendan are the same, our fear has made us level.
Paula is talking to the Red faced soldier, hands white knuckling the wheel as she speaks slowly and clearly. Inishowen. Derry. Home again. Bike tyres. The answers don’t change but the questions do.
It’s a moment, maybe a second. Less than a flinch from Brendan, more a contraction of muscle and an intrinsic knowing that has my eyes flicking wildly from Paula’s chipped nail polish and the Soldiers spitting face to the rear passenger mirror.
Where the damn dog sits.
Alert.
And then the screams start.
“On the ground!”
“-Kids!”
“Out!”
“I don’t-”
“-don’t have-”
“Down!”
“-Bike tires-”
“On – Ground”
“What do you have?”
“There’s-”
“-Bomb-”
“On the ground!”
“-Not – IRA”
“Get out the fucking car!”
It happens in sporadic bursts. The soldiers scream at each other and at us. The doors are thrown open and we are pushed out. A hand clenches around my lungs, fear a vice grip on my sporadic gasping as I scramble on awkward gangly limbs for the narrow gap between the passenger door and the barrel of a British gun. I launch myself from the car, feral in my desperation. To be out, to not be here, to have gone somewhere up and above and beyond. Where God’s hands descend skyward, cradling the land and people as flightless birds pass earth’s gravity in one single joyous bout of children’s laughter…
My bare knees smackdown against the dirt, flesh making an audible crunch as blood gives way to stick and stone. The pain, a line of fire shooting up my legs, burns but is nothing when my back still caves to the force of the soldier’s phantom hand. He is there, somewhere behind me, beyond my vision, and the fear of this shadowy unknown grips me harder than the sight of his gun in my face, driving me again to move faster, scrambling and sliding in the slick mud for a foothold to turn myself around.
Brendan is screaming bloody murder. No words, just a voice to the visceral panic that binds all of us. More wolf than boy as he bares baby teeth at the rifles trained upon him. It is hard, in this moment, to reconcile him with the soft spoken boy I know him to be. The boy who likes books with pictures and kittens with soft whiskers and still clutches the strings of his mother’s skirts. The boy the soldiers can not see beyond his fright.
This is what fear does, the kind that grinds on you day in and day out, fear so familiar it becomes more friend then foe – before it rears it ugly head. The fear..it turns you animal.
But Brendan is my cousin and beyond fear and anger and family ties there is the thum-drum beat of a truth that binds our people to this land. The truth that says I am his and he is mine. The truth that says this, you protect.
And I do the only thing that I can. The only thing I can think of. The only thing that I have that my cousins do not, beyond their warm houses and Ma’s and Da’s and patient love and everything….I have my Blue Book.
“I’m an American, I’m an American, I’m an American!”
It’s just another voice in the carnage. Brendan still screams, Lilly’s still crying, Paula begs reason and Éabha’s quiet. A maybe prayer.
But it is enough of a shock, loud and absurd enough, that the second soldier, in his land gouging boots, turns incredulous, and our eyes lock for a moment. The car headlights illuminate his medal cap, shapes his face in damning clarity. I feel his eyes more than see them, locked on mine. Just glints of light in the shadow of his helmet, The expression there a mystery. Raw, but conflated with emotion, panic, terror, and hate.
But he tilts his head, ever so slightly, and I move before I think. Instinct propelling motion before thought and beyond reason, my arms crossing the line of fire in one single grasping moment to bodily drag Brendan from the car.
Hands of god.
We are fearful, in the dirt, as the soldiers pop the damned boot. The Cranberries’ dulcet tones still drifting skyward from the car’s loyal speakers, unknowing or uncaring of the events of the last five minutes. Comforting in some ways, but then again, just another horror as we lie ever, ever, so still.
As they find, ultimately, not a car bomb or grenade or kindergarten terrorist or whatever other creative nightmare they spoon feed good protestant soldiers – but a farmer’s gun. Forgotten by an old grandfather after a lazy sunday trip of sandwiches and birding. Gloved hands pull it cautiously from the car, license and all, and bag tag it like the weapon of mass destruction it is in a Catholic’s filthy fingers.
Our eyes never leave the soldier though, the one in front of us, barrel of the gun trained on our prostrated muddy forms. In my mouth, in my hair, in the gouges on my knees and under the nails of the fingers that grip Paula’s shirt, hanging onto something, anything, hanging onto hope. Éabha’s praying, lips to the ground, pious exhalations moving blades of stray grass. Our father…forgive. Our father… forgive.
I have my own prayer. Forgive me queen mother, for I was born and therefore sinned.
And what was the soldier thinking? When he looked down on us? These praying children laying in the dirt? Did he feel anger? Did he feel brave? Did he feel powerful? Did he understand then, the wrath of a vengeful god?
To make someone feel so small, so scared, so animal….it is a different kind of violence.
We don’t get the gun back. We pile inside the car, the deathbox that caged us, and now carries us away from the soldiers standing stalwart at their checkpoint. That towering unnatural protrusion on the land. Like a disease, infection pushed to the surface from the hate that runs so deep here.
The ride is quiet, nobody willing to talk, to laugh. Paula’s shaking hand smacks the radio silent. We’re just…quiet, for fear of a car on our tail, for fear of them having changed their minds, for fear of fear itself.
I roll down the window, just a little, trying to ease an ache in my chest I haven’t the words to describe. I crave it, like cool water on cracked lips, I need some air, something cool, something untouched by the oppressive silence of this car. The wind dries the dirt hard against my cheeks, salt tears blurring my surroundings where the speed of the car will not – cannot any longer. Our little Red hearse car travels exactly the speed limit, rules suddenly found where there was once nothing but the open road before us and the places it could take us.
We are a mournful bunch, bereaved by a loss we can’t yet name – but the coffin is child sized and innocent.
Something has been displaced in my chest. There has been a monumental shift, undertaken without my consent or knowledge. This thing… it is not burning rage or icy fear. Those I have known… This is old and enduring. Hard to catch and harder still to remove. The sunset sets on a world different to the one I rose in. Life as I knew it was not true, and the lie of the world, the indiscrepancy, the injustice, has made me wrathful. We are not free. They told us we are but we aren’t.
Six traumatized kids in a culchie car, hands gripping hands knowing our eyes are open now and we can’t take that back….
That is how the war is born.
I have lost something, in the mud, or gained awareness of something I didn’t know I had. Like another organ, nestled between my ribs, a rabbit heart banging a wardrum against my bones.
Lie.Lie.Lie.
Truth.Truth.Truth.
Hate.Hate.Hate.
We. Are. Not. Free.