Editions and Variants: A Textual History of “Assumptions”

I. Why This Story Needs a Bibliography

Some discussion of “Assumptions” treats the story as a fixed object: a single text to be read closely for its Marian iconography, its baptismal fire, and its Song of Solomon epigraph. This essay takes a different approach, treating “Assumptions” 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 material to expose. Tracing those choices can show how the text shifts between explicit doctrine and implicit suggestion as it appears for new audiences.

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, with the opening (“Peggy Fleming, according to my grandfather, was the ’homeliest damn woman’ he’d ever seen”) and theological material used in that edition. The story returned to periodical publication in 2020 in The Galway Review, an Irish literary magazine whose editorial context may have led to different authorial choices than either the original web publication or the story’s place inside a themed collection. Most recently, a further revised version appears in All We Ever Needed (Silver Current Press, 2026), where the story opens the collection and sits alongside seven other pieces connected by water and food motifs named in the 2026 introduction. These four public contexts imply different audiences and contain measurable textual differences.

III. What the Galway Review Version Cuts

A notable 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.” The cuts may point toward theological caution. The hell line takes 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. Removing the Lughnasadh paragraph leaves the story’s religious imagery more legible as straightforwardly Catholic and less legible as consciously syncretic, a distinction relevant to readings of the fiction’s relationship between pre-Christian and Christian material. Removing the harvest-loam image leaves the ending to rest more heavily on 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 might mean. Read together, the Galway Review cuts may suggest an author testing how much of the story’s syncretistic theology needs to be stated outright and how much can be left for a reader to infer from imagery alone — fire, water, the Song of Solomon epigraph, and the feast day itself — without a paragraph connecting Mary to Lugh. The fuller version appears in both the 2016 and 2026 book editions, which may indicate a preference for a different balance in book form than in periodical form. In a book, the surrounding introduction, author’s note, or title page can assist a reader with some of the interpretive work that a magazine version leaves implicit.

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

The All We Ever Needed version is not simply “the 2016 text restored,” because the story’s context has changed even where its wording has not. The 2016 collection was titled after this story’s central image; the 2026 collection is a different, larger book whose introduction places “Assumptions” at the beginning of an eight-story sequence about water, food, mercy, and inherited damage, naming the “seawater cure sought on the Feast of the Assumption” as an early instance of a water motif that recurs 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 therefore differs from reading the same words inside Assumptions and Other Stories, even where the sentences are identical, because the later book places the story among related uses of water across eight stories. A textual history of the story can consequently include 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 could obtain and collate all four public texts word for word to establish the variants more fully.

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