CJ
Lancer
Derry was a city still holding its breath, beneath a bruised sky that never quite cleared. It didn’t roar at her birth but murmured, hummed low through windowpanes and old pipes. The streets bore names older than her grandmother’s hands, and the walls still carried the heat of fires no one spoke of. Her cradle sat in a second-floor, a small flat with thin insulation and a view of the Peace Bridge like a cracked tooth rising through fog. At night her mother read housing applications instead of fairy tales. Her father, soft-eyed and quiet, fixed what broke and taught her that most problems didn’t need speeches, only the right tool and a steady hand.
She grew beneath murals that watched children too hard, saints in berets, angels painted with slogans. But she wasn’t built for marching. She listened. In kitchens filled with steam and council flats that smelled of damp concrete, she watched how people folded their arms before they lied, how they softened when someone truly heard them. Dignity, she learned, could be returned in small ways. While her classmates argued over flags, she rewrote letters for pensioners and filed complaint forms that no one else had time for. She was quiet, but she moved with the purpose of someone who already knew the roof leaked and still chose to fix the faucet first.
When asked what side she was on, she said, “Whichever one leaves the bins collected.” There was no pride in broken boilers or silence between neighbors. Her politics lived in rusted radiators and waterlogged ceilings, in heating slips and shared kettles. She didn’t quote martyrs. She carried spare pens. Her loyalty was to the woman in the stairwell who hadn’t eaten and the man too proud to ask for help. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t have to. People listened because they trusted her to show up and get it done.
She enrolled in university to study public systems, though she spent more time fixing them than reading about them. The classroom felt distant compared to the boiler room, the benefits office, the queue at the housing block. She never asked for power but moved like someone who already held it in her hands. She wasn’t the kind to spark revolutions. She believed in forms, timetables, working lifts, and someone remembering your name when you asked for help. If there was something broken, she was the one who stayed behind to sweep up.
Then the sky changed. Weather broke. Silence came. Broadcasts stopped. Borders vanished. People vanished. She left the city not with tears but with folded sleeves and the quiet focus of someone who knew collapse when she saw it. She didn’t carry banners or slogans. She carried the tools she’d always used. Ahead was another place already starting to fall apart. And she would be there, as always, to hold something together while the world let go.