Editions and Variants: A Textual History of “Assumptions”

I. Why This Story Needs a Bibliography

Most of the critical attention paid to “Assumptions” — and it has received more sustained scholarly attention than any other single piece in Mulhern’s corpus — treats the story as a fixed object: a single text to be read closely for its Marian iconography, its baptismal fire, its Song of Solomon epigraph. This essay takes a different approach, treating “Assumptions” instead as what descriptive bibliography calls a text with a history: a piece that has existed in at least three distinct public forms across more than a decade, each version making different choices about how much of the story’s theological apparatus to expose. Tracing those choices is not a pedantic exercise in collation for its own sake; it reveals an author actively revising the ratio of explicit doctrine to implicit suggestion each time the story found a new audience, which is itself a form of criticism the author has performed on his own work.

II. The Publication Record

“Assumptions” first appeared online in Fiction on the Web in 2015, before being collected the following year in Assumptions and Other Stories (Silver Current Press / KDP, June 2016) — the story’s first appearance between covers, and the version that established its now-canonical opening (“Peggy Fleming, according to my grandfather, was the ’homeliest damn woman’ he’d ever seen”) and its full theological architecture. The story returned to periodical publication in 2020 in The Galway Review, an Irish literary magazine whose editorial context — an audience already immersed in Irish literary and religious reference — appears to have licensed a different set of authorial choices than either the original web publication or the story’s home inside a themed collection. Most recently, a further revised version appears in All We Ever Needed (Silver Current Press, 2026), where the story now opens the collection and sits alongside seven other pieces united by explicit water and food motifs the 2026 introduction names directly. Four public contexts, four implied audiences, and — crucially — measurable differences in the text itself.

III. What the Galway Review Version Cuts

The most consequential variant concerns the 2020 Galway Review text, which removes three elements present in both the 2016 collected version and the 2026 All We Ever Needed text: a line asserting that non-Catholics are damned to hell, a paragraph developing a syncretism between the Christian feast of the Assumption and the pagan harvest festival of Lughnasadh (drawing an explicit parallel between the Virgin Mary and the god Lugh), and the story’s closing image of the mother’s body settling beneath “dusty harvest loam.” Each cut works in the same direction: toward theological caution. The hell line is the story’s most doctrinally aggressive moment, staking out an exclusionary Catholic position that a magazine with a broader, more religiously mixed Irish readership might reasonably have asked to soften or that Mulhern may have chosen to soften himself, anticipating that readership. The Lughnasadh paragraph is the story’s most syncretistic moment, explicitly braiding pagan and Christian material in a way that, removed, leaves the story’s religious imagery more legible as straightforwardly Catholic and less legible as consciously syncretic — an interpretive move that matters enormously for any essay (including several already in this series) that reads Mulhern’s fiction as knowingly blending pre-Christian and Christian material. And the harvest-loam closing image is the story’s most explicitly agricultural-pagan visual, its removal leaving the ending to rest more heavily on the water and fire imagery that survives in every version.

IV. Reading the Cuts as Authorial Argument

A descriptive bibliographer’s task is to record variants; a critic’s task is to ask what the variants mean. Read together, the Galway Review cuts suggest an author testing how much of his story’s syncretistic theology needs to be stated outright versus how much can be left for a careful reader to infer from imagery alone — fire, water, the Song of Solomon epigraph, the feast day itself — without a paragraph explicitly instructing the reader to connect Mary to Lugh. That the fuller, more doctrinally explicit and syncretistically explicit version is the one Mulhern chose to restore for both the story’s original 2016 book publication and its most recent 2026 return to book form suggests a settled preference: in periodical form, addressed to an audience encountering the story once, in isolation, Mulhern trims toward implication; in book form, where the story sits inside an authorial frame (an introduction, an author’s note, a title page) that already signals its own theological ambitions, he restores the fuller apparatus, trusting the surrounding paratext to do some of the interpretive work the trimmed magazine version had to accomplish through inference alone.

V. The 2026 Text as a Third State, Not a Simple Restoration

It would be a mistake to describe the All We Ever Needed version simply as “the 2016 text restored,” because the story’s context has changed in ways that alter its meaning even where its wording has not. The 2016 collection was titled after this story’s central image and stood as the author’s primary short-fiction statement; the 2026 collection is a different, larger book whose introduction retroactively frames “Assumptions” as the first movement of an eight-story arc about water, food, mercy, and inherited damage, explicitly naming the “seawater cure sought on the Feast of the Assumption” as the first instance of a water motif that will recur through “a bath drawn for an aging mother” and “at last a rain that leaves a man drenched to the bone.” Reading “Assumptions” inside All We Ever Needed is therefore a different critical experience from reading the same words inside Assumptions and Other Stories, even where the sentences are identical, because the surrounding architecture now explicitly instructs the reader to track water across eight stories rather than to read “Assumptions” as a self-contained set piece. A textual history of this story is thus also, necessarily, a history of its changing critical frame.

VI. Toward a Collated Edition

This essay does not attempt a full collation — a line-by-line comparison of all three or four texts — because the 2015 Fiction on the Web text and the exact 2016 first-edition wording were not independently available for direct comparison at the time of writing, and any claim to completeness would overstate what has been verified. What can be stated with confidence is the shape of the variation: a periodical version that trims explicit doctrinal and syncretistic claims, and book versions, eleven years apart, that restore them. Future work on this series would do well to obtain and collate all four public texts word for word, since a story this heavily analyzed for its theological architecture deserves the same editorial rigor bibliographers routinely apply to canonical texts with far less interpretive weight resting on their exact wording.

Publication history and variant details recorded here are drawn from internal bibliographic review; readers wishing to verify specific line-level differences should consult the 2016 Assumptions and Other Stories (Silver Current Press), the 2020 Galway Review printing, and the 2026 All We Ever Needed (Silver Current Press) texts directly.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Unquenchable Fire