things you’re not googling this morning

by Justine Sweeney

5am: Invasive Ductal Carcinoma. Focus instead on the holiday insurance small print. How much is refundable? Fights. Hire car. Lucky you were so lastminute, with the itinerary. You hadn’t booked a show yet. You’d swiped for days through reels of white foam rising below plunging aquamarine falls and imagined the cool spray on your face, but you’d procrastinated and hadn’t actually settled on a day and booked that Maid of the Mist boat tour in Niagara.

5.05am: What do CT and MRI scans show? You already know what they can show, and the internet can’t tell you what yours will show so delete what you are typing into the search bar and open up a property website because this might be a good time to downsize and see if you can all live somewhere smaller, cosier, with less of a mortgage.

5.30am: What treatments are there for... Stop! You’ll know when you know. Smart people will tell you what’s next. Close your eyes, think of the soft spray touching your face, slapping rapids have eased to a trickle. Meandering along, you follow the river’s slow path.

5.43am: How to talk to children about... Instead look up a recipe for muffins, check you’ve got the ingredients in and get cooking before the kids wake up. You’ve no vanilla extract but surely you can get away with it if you dish them up with maple syrup and blueberries, wing it like you’re winging everything right now, but keep your mind laser focussed on the method. Weigh the flour. Stir the batter. Grease the tin.

BIO: Justine is an Irish writer. Her stories appear in journals and anthologies such as the Dublin Review, Banshee Press, Moon City Review, Bath Flash, Trash Cat Lit, Inkfish Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Fish Publishing, and Fictive Dream. Her first collection of stories was shortlisted/ highly commended in the Bath Novella-in-flash Award 2025. She has a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing and before that she wrote software code.