#ceol2017

I can’t really hear anything now. There are all these people telling us their condolences, hugging my mother with tears in their eyes. I wonder why they are crying. Why does it hurt so much, feeling other people’s grief? Though some of the grief must be their own. Aggy knew everyone on this island, and all but the most cold hearted loved her. She was mischief and kindness wrapped in a wild package, and everyone loved her. But no one really did, either. No one loved her like I did. Not even my mother. Only I could love her with my love because I am the only one who can love with my love, and she had all of it. She still has it, she will always have it, and death can not take that. I am angry at death for trying. I am vindictive because he has failed. He can not take my love from my sister. It goes with her forever.

Mother Oman says some words. The pyre blazes.  They keep adding more wood, as if it should burn forever. I think how beautiful that would be, if she could be a beacon on this hill, shining forever.

They are calling me forward. No, just one, Terrance, calling my name softly and holding out his hand. I want him to do it for a moment, because I feel so weak, but I know I am the only one. I would have no one else do it. It is my place.

I take a bowl of her ashes and I take the reins of her mare, Fiain, and lead her down to the water’s edge. Just a little ways away there is another pyre, and another figure and capall silhouetted against it, waiting to do the same thing.

Aggy’s friend’s horse got in a fight with another horse, and they both died trying to pull them apart. I don’t know which capaill ripped a hole in her chest. It doesn’t matter. The one got away, and the other is being led down after I am done. They will both go back to the sea.

It seems a shame, as I look at Fiain’s slender face, eyes so unsure, that she should go back to her watery home so soon. We never found out if she was fast. We never got to ride her at all, barely got to know her. She barely knew us. I run a finger down the slope of her nose, and whisper in her ear. She dances soundlessly on the sand. There are tears trickling down my face, and getting in my nose, and they are going to make my sneeze, which would not be good right now. I wipe them quickly away. I walk her carefully into the sea.

I hold her steady, singing into her ear. I hold her head with one hand and the bowl of ashes in the other. I know how this is done. I’ve done it once before. I didn’t want to ever do it again.

I slip her halter off her head and chant the words I know by heart from them repeating in my head as I dreamed again and again the memory of releasing my father’s capall into the sea. I scatter her ashes with hands that are bigger than they were then, but that shake just as much. I whisper her name three times as her capall arches its back and dives into the deep. I am standing in silence, like I am in a trance, holding the empty bowl in a limp hand, and watching the sea where that grey back just disappeared. Someone is whispering my name. I turn. It’s Elfleda, all the color drained from her face; or maybe it’s just the moonlight. I look up. It’s a full moon. Aggy said she would ride her grey mare forever under a full moon. I can see it in my head. I am crying again. Elfleda takes my hand and gently pulls me back up the hill.

It’s only as I stand, alone again, in front of the dying fire, and the crowd from the other pyre joins ours, and I realize that people have been flitting between the two, that I realize what song I had been singing in Fiain’s ear. Over and over and over again, just one line, over and over and over again:

We’re kings and queens, we’ll always be.

We’re kings and queens, we’ll always be.

I wrote it for someone else. But now, with flames stained in my eyes, I realize that it’s also Aggy and I. King and Queen forever. Racing under the full moon. Timeless gods in our bones, the infinite, stretched inside our skin, ages quick.

Mortal but infinite. Gone but still here. I get a chill, and look back out towards the water. No one sees them but me, a pack of silvery dogs, spread out like an arrow, like geese fly, running over the water. Chasing her ashes over the tide. Escorting her home. Home to the sea.

I look back to the crowd around the fire, now thinning. She must be here. Surely, even with everything, she would come. I don’t see her, but, Mona has always been good at hiding. Unless she has gone back to Hastoway. She usually stays for the races, but perhaps this year she has gone back home. I close my eyes. The heat from the low fire is hotter than when it was high. Someone is taking my hand. This time it is my mother. She is still crying. Neither of us say anything. We stand like that until they dose out the embers, and then, at last, we go home.

The King comes to me late that night. He smells of ash and grief. There is only one loss that could cause him to be this distraught. He was not the one to come get my grey sister, but even then, I knew what it meant. He taps my nose halfheartedly, and leans his face against my stall bars for awhile, and I blow on him gently. I wish I had words. Even then, would I know what to say to him? My heart is heavy in my chest. The Queen is gone. I will miss her. Not as much as he does, but I will miss her.

Eventually, he slumps down with his back against my stall door, and starts talking. He is debating with himself. He is asking me questions I can’t answer. He has to answer them for himself.

The races are tomorrow. He is wondering if he should ride. Would it dishonor his sister to ride tomorrow? Would it seem calloused? He tilts his head back to look up at me. I have my head tilted sideways and down, to watch him with one eye. We look at each other for a long moment. I think we understand each other like we never have.

Riding would not dishonor her. Winning would honor her more than anything.

He stands up, grabs the bars between us, and says, “For Aggy.” I keen her name back to him. Does he know that is the sound of my name for her? From the water in his eyes, I think he does.

I will run faster than I ever have before.

I spend most of my life on the sea. I have been catching crab ever since my father died when I was thirteen, but every year I make sure that I make it back in time for the races. It’s the end of fishing season anyway; only large boats with big crews can stay out during the winter. I only have myself and Terrence, who is my father’s stepbrother -  a crazy old man who spends most his land time drunk. My sister and I have never called him Uncle; maybe because he’s never been much of an adult, and my parents didn’t want us thinking we had to look up to him much.

Today we are tying up at the docks, and the island is tingling with excitement. There are kids running everywhere as they welcome home their fathers and shout about the first capaill uisce coming up out of the sea just the day before. Terrence hears them, and spits into the swishing swell alongside the dock.

“A good day to come off the sea, it is then,” he says.

We are both thinking about when he and my father got caught in a storm, and my father was pulled into the sea. Death is a part of our everyday life; it’s best not to fear it too much. But Terrence lives a half death every day, knowing that it could have been him. Or it could have been both of them. I remember, when he came back alone, that I wished the sea could have taken him instead. I wrote a trade on a sea wish that festival time, but the sea did not give my father back. It has yet to take Terrence. Perhaps it doesn’t like his ever present scent of whiskey, even though I don’t let him bring drink on the boat. Or perhaps it is being merciful to me, since then I would have no one to fish with, though I am sure the sea owes me no favors.

We finish tying up the boat, unload our cargo, and I head home, while Terrance heads to the pub. We’ll sell the crabs tomorrow. For now, I need a good warm bath, some hot tea, and my mother’s cooking.

She’s snipping herbs from the garden when I come up the lane; it will be the last of them. The air feels like we’re getting a good frost tonight. She calls my name and waves and is hugging me before I can get through the gate, asking me how I am and how the catch is and is Terrence still holding out, the old man, and good grief do you smell, and we’re having chicken and dumplings tonight of course I never disappoint my boy… and she’s dragging me inside and her hands are shaking and her lip is trembling and she is trying to laugh and to take my bags even though they are very heavy. She seems thinner every time I come back. She worries about me when I am out on the sea and she worries about me when I am in the races and she worries about me even when I am home, whenever I am out at the barn training Ceol. “Vive la vie!” I tell her over and over again, whenever I see the worry eating her to skin and bones, and shake her playfully by the shoulders. She always humors me with a fake laugh, and pats my cheek affectionately, but she does not “live the life.” She lives the death, every day, just like Terrence.

“Where’s Aggy?” I ask as she escorts me to my room, as if I have forgotten where it is.

“Oh, you know, running about wild over the island and probably terrorizing some innocent, like the pixie she is,” my mother says with a laugh; another half laugh, because she worries about my little sister too, though different worries than the ones concerning me. She worries that she will never settle down and grow up, that she will never marry and instead be some old hag living alone and plaguing her neighbors and hoarding cats… it doesn’t help that this is actually my sister’s version of a dream life, a fact that she does not try to hide, and it also doesn’t help that I find this picture both very fitting and very amusing, and do not hide this either.

No one lives a worry-free life on Thisby, but we certainly push our poor mother to the edge.

I strip out of my salt stiffened clothes and take a bath, complete with some rose scented bubble bath that is probably Aggy’s, because I could probably use all the good scents I can possibly soak into my skin. Also because it makes a lot of bubbles, which are amusing to me anyway, and are especially amusing because Mom’s little poofy tailed dog has decided to keep me company, and we both discover that bubbles stress her out. I blow them at her face and she whines and growls and backs away, and jumps and looks around frantically for them when they pop.

I think her name is Sadie. Aggy got her for Mom for her birthday this spring right before I left for the season, so I haven’t seen much of her. She’s not much of a dog, in the traditional sense of a Dog, but she is cute, I have to admit. I wonder if the cat who likes to sleep on our garden wall is still around. He was starting to go lame in one foot when I left. Aggy was trying to give him herbal remedies, but he wasn’t being very cooperative.

I nearly fall asleep, but finally notice that the water has started to get cold, and climb out to pull on warm clothes.

Sadie also does not like the gurgling sound of water going down a drain, and decides to bark at it until I kick her out.

I comb out my hair and make a note to visit the barber tomorrow. My straight razor has been set out for me, by either my mother or my sister, as they both have a strangely strong distaste for facial hair, and they know I always come back from the sea looking like a mountain man. I spare myself their comments, and go ahead and shave, even though I can smell dumplings, and can hear my sister banging the door open and stomping off her boots and talking about the neighbors so loudly that they can probably hear her from next door.

She is waiting for me in the hall when I am finished, and gives me a big hug that is very powerful for her short, sixteen year old frame.

“Welcome home ya filthy animal!” she crows. She’s got a walkman sticking out of her jacket pocket, and huge headphones slung around her neck, though they’re half hidden, even as big as they are, in her poofy brown hair.

“Thanks, turkey,” I say, ruffling her already ruffled hair. “How’s the day?”

“Oh, you know, going,” she says. “The capa-”

“Yeah, I heard, they’re in,” I finish for her. “Caught one yet?”

She wrinkles her face up till she looks like a troll. “Figured you’d do that bit, as per usual.”

“I’ll probably be catching more than one,” I say with a fake sigh.

Mom calls that dinner is ready. She pours kibble in the dog’s dish and washes her hands. We scrape back chairs and take our seats. I say the blessing while we hold hands. Then we eat, and we don’t speak again till we’re finished. Me, because I am ravenously hungry, and them, because they know better than to interrupt the very serious business of filling your belly after so long of eating nothing but dried fish and hardtack.

When I’ve had my fill, we drink tea and talk. They catch me up on everyone's gossip here, and I catch them up on the things the fisherman pass back and forth on the sea, as well as the things we hear from other vessels passing us by, or that we hear over the ship radio. There isn’t ever much, and it mostly has to do with seafood numbers, which my mother and sister can only pretend to be interested in. But I can only pretend to be interested in babies with colic and the petty rivals of grandmothers, so, we’re pretty even.

After we’ve had some cake, Aggy and I leave for the barn, and she tells me all the things I really want to hear: all things concerning the capaill, which our mother does not want to hear. She catches me up on who has this mount and who’s mounts are ready to race and which ones aren’t and which ones aren’t ready but are going to race anyway and so will probably be eaten. She tells me who’s racing this year that hasn’t before, who’s retiring from them, and that Jameson broke his leg and the doctor says it won’t be healed in time. Which is fine with me. I never liked Jameson.

When we get to the barn, Ceol is already keening for me. He smelled me on the wind. He’s missed me.

Aggy hangs back to give us a minute, and talks to a stall hand. I press my face against the iron bars of the stall, and Ceol presses his nose to mine. We exchange breaths, back and forth, even though his breath reeks of death. My nose is not a very sensitive one anymore; it’s pretty much always smelling unpleasant things.

I whisper my love to him. I trace one finger up the hooked curve of one of his ears. He is watching me, eyes big and black and watery. I have had him since I was thirteen; I caught him just days before I heard news of my father’s death. We have ridden in the races every year since I was old enough; I trained him until I was. We’ve never won, but one year we pushed into the top five. That was the year before last. I am twenty-four now. I don’t know how old he is. I like to think that he is endless, like the sea.

Aggy finally comes to join me. Ceol presses his nose towards her as well, and she tickles it with the tip of her finger. She’s his caretaker when I’m not around. When we were both younger, I used to have my cousin Lew look after him, but Lew has a family now, and too many responsibilities of his own to be worrying about mine. So Aggy took over. Mom actually fought with us about that, but she lost. You can’t keep Aggy from the capaill any more than you can keep the sea from the land. They’ve got to meet eventually.

“He’s been lazy lately,” Aggy tells me. “I think he’s been pouting.”

“I haven’t been gone any longer than usual, have I?” I say, combing my fingers through his forelock.

“No, but the season is changing faster this year than usual,” Aggy says.

“So it’s the sea,” I say.

“It’s the sea,” she agrees.

I’m itching to ride him, but it’s dark out. That, like the barber, will have to wait till tomorrow. Aggy and I stand and watch him for a bit, and he watches us back, still and silent, taking in every detail of us, as if we are books to read. I can read him pretty well by now as well, but not enough to win the races. I still struggle to hold him out of the sea.

Ceol. Music. His song haunts my dreams, and I rarely dare to touch him when we run. He is large, even for a capall, and black as night. His head has a wicked look to it, and all his edges are made of sharp corners. He reeks of kelp no matter how many times you wash him with shampoo, and his tail streams out like a banner behind him whenever he runs, or whenever he’s feeling angsty and disagreeable. He is a monster of a horse and my mother is convinced that he will be the end of me. I have to disagree with her to her face, even though I know that it’s a high possibility.

We have known each other for a long time. Sometimes I trust him too much. I try to catch myself, but I shouldn’t ever fall into it in the first place. It’s a good way to end up dead. I’ve seen the sharp look in his eye as his head trains on me after I’ve slipped up on something. Eyes that measure and read me. Jaw big enough to crush my neck.

Ceol is not a horse, and he never will be. He is a capall. He comes from the sea. And as much as he loves me, there is a part of him that also hates me. It hates me because he will always love the sea more, and I am holding him back from it.

The sea and I are in constant contest. One day, I will lose.

I don’t have an answer to that. I just know that Aggy would want me to ride. I know she would ride for me, if our places were switched.

Oh God, how I wish our places were switched.

Ceol is unusually focused. There is dark purpose in his liquid eyes. He snaps viciously whenever anyone gets too close, capaill or human, and he feels like an electric current when I touch him.

I’ve got to keep my skin away from his today, or my mother really will lose another child to the sea.

The time comes. I do not feel ready. I never feel ready. We line up as best as capaill can. There is a rushing in my ears. I barely hear the gun. I don’t even tell Ceol to take off, but he charges with the others. I focus on my breathing, make my eyes take in the riders around me, get my grip on the reins. If I don’t ride this race, Ceol will race it for me, and it is in his nature to run it into the sea, no matter how much he does or doesn’t know my need to win. I can’t trust him like that. I need to be in control.

I see a flash of green copper out of the corner of my eye; Elfeda is riding, all focus, all charge. She is several riders away from me, towards the edge. I am being pushed nearer and nearer to the sea. Ceol’s ears are flickering away from me, towards the waves. I snap the reins, and reach out to pull one of his ears towards me. I sing a stronger melody than the sea. I sing what he is to me. I sing our need to win. I sing of Aggy. I push him forwards, towards a gap, trying to get away from the sea.

It’s such a short race. All races are. It feels like forever stretched inside a moment. So many opportunities to die strung together in just a few moments. It feels like two days and half a second at the same time. There are so many things you have to see. You can’t see them all. You don’t have enough time. Everything feels slow, but it isn’t. You don’t have time. You can’t see and you can’t predict.

I did not see the black horse on my right snake out to grab my foot. Ceol did. He should have run faster, but he was already angry. Angry with my anger.

I could not predict that he would turn on my attacker, instead of running on. I could not see the tan capall breaking away from it’s rider, surging towards my unprotected back, grabbing onto my shirt, ripping off my paper number, unbalancing me in my saddle. I could not predict Ceol turning his hind feet towards the black horse for a kick, and now aiming his teeth at the passing tan horse instead. I could not see, as I suffered from the whiplash and struggled to regain my seat, the blue roan that came crashing into us as the tan one got away from Ceol’s snapping teeth, as a crowd of close riders come upon us, slowed as we are to nearly a halt.

I try to urge Ceol on, but I am slipping. I don’t have any grip at all, the others are rushing past me, Ceol tries to leap for the clear-

I am rolling into the water. What sounds like a thousand feet rush past me. Ceol rears in menace at a horse that tries to come towards me. I am struggling to me feet. Ceol is dancing in the water, eyes wild, sweating hard. By the time I calm him enough to remount, it will be too late. There is a stone in my stomach. I sit back down. Ceol is still dancing, watching me with wild eyes.

I whisper, “It’s alright.” Something escapes as I say it. Something inside of me tells it back to me. “It’s alright.”

His dancing slows a little. A strange song is coming out of my throat. It doesn't have words. I don’t know them yet. Maybe I never will. His ears are swiveled towards me, and not the sea. We are the only people in the world. Aggy is in the sea. She said… what was it she said to me? About the races. I’d asked if she’d won, in her capall dream. She’d said something about not thinking that that was the point.

I close my eyes. I can see her laughing, running, racing me home. I hear the small splashes of Ceol walking towards me. I put up my hand, and open my eyes. He stops just short of touching me. I’ve stopped singing. He’s shivering. He’s standing a few feet from rushing to his home, and there is hunger in his eyes. But he won’t eat me. He wants to go home, but he won’t eat me.

I did not need to race today. I should not have tried to race today. I am barely back in my own mind, my own body. I could have died. Maybe a part of me wanted to die. I am very lucky that I didn’t die. My job in this race is to look out for my capall, and instead, Ceol looked out for me.

I stand slowly. He’s backing away. There is a look in his eyes that I can not call him back from, not for all the singing in the world. Still I sing, and whisper through the singing, “Let me at least untie you, let me at least-”

But he is shying away from my hand. Deeper and deeper. Wild thing. I should move away, before he changes his mind. Today is the day he should eat me, of all days, when I have no fight left in me. We look into each other’s eyes. I think he’s sorry we didn’t win. I whisper again, “It’s ok.”

He turns. He leaps. He takes himself and everything he carries into the sea. I stand alone, with the roar of the crowd coming from a different world. The overwhelming smell of blood coming from a different world.

In this one, I am alone. So alone, that it feels as if no one will reach me ever again. My sister is in the sea. And so is my friend. And even though I let him go, all this grief is too big for my body.

Mom actually came to the race, to watch me not die. She is very glad to hold me in her arms, when it is all over. She doesn't really care that Ceol is gone. She goes on home while I stay to check on Elfleda. She made it through. She didn’t win, but she did well, and she is very happy. I don’t tell her that I lost Ceol. She didn’t see. I’ll tell her later. I can’t say the words right now.

I walk home by myself. My feet drag, and make the walk longer than it has ever been. The song that I’ve written and the this new song that I haven’t are getting tangled in my head.

There is someone standing in the doorway to my house. I think it is Mom, until I get closer. She is smaller. Her hair and skin are dark. There is all this water in my throat. There is water in her eyes. I walk into her arms, and she holds me while I cry.

When I am done, and as I prepare to heave my weight against the wheelbarrow to dump its contents outside, a cold breeze waifs past my legs, and my head jerks up to see a silvery shadow of a dog dash out of the barn. I freeze, waiting for more to rush past me, but feel nothing else. I look around, expecting to see her, expecting to see Mona. I have never seen the Madrai Uisce except around her. Ghost dogs from the sea. I don’t know how she summons them, or why, or why there are ghosts of dogs in the sea, but she says they used to come here, like the horses, but they could never be tamed, so they were killed. And now only their ghosts remain. I don’t know how she knows all that, but if anyone would know, it would be her. Still, I can’t find Madrai Uisce anywhere in the history books of Thisby. If they did roam here, it was long, long ago, before people wrote things down.

Wherever they are from though, they are real, and they are ghosts, and one of them was just here, even though she is not. Ceol and Fiain, as Aggy has decided to call her mare, are both on edge.

There is only one reason why they ever run apart from her. All the hair on the back of my neck is standing on end, and there is a wild drumbeat in my chest instead of my heart. There are running footsteps coming towards the barn. I don’t want to turn around, but the owner of the footsteps has started to shout my name.

“Jan! Jan!” It is one of the stable hands, and she catches hold of the doorway, panting. I can not describe the look on her face. I don’t think I really hear the words that come out of her mouth. She says, “Jan, your sister. It’s your sister, the beach-”

I am already running and I do not think I heard the words she said because she can not have said them, she can not have meant what I know she means, the ghost dog can not have come as a messenger for me, Aggy is fine Aggy is not dead Aggy is not- I am choking on wind and water in my throat. Why is there water in my throat?

I don’t remember getting to the beach. I remember leaving the barn and I remember tripping through the sand because my feet don’t want to lift and I can’t breathe and my heart is now beating outside of my body instead of inside my chest where it should be, and there is a crowd and she is just hurt, or she saved someone’s life, or her friend is dead or… she is just hurt Jesus in heaven she is just hurt let her just be hurt-

The crowd looks up and parts for me. There are two sheets on the ground covering two bodies. I can see her hand poking out. I’d know that hand anywhere. There is a strange noise coming out of my body and I fall to the sand beside her and grip her hand and am somehow expecting her to grip it back. She doesn’t grip back. Someone is pulling back the sheet for me to see. I don’t want to see. I need to see. That is not her face. Cold and white with eyes closed. That is not her chest, red and only half there. They put the sheet back. I think I am screaming. Maybe someone else is screaming. I think I am calling the King of Heaven awful names. Someone is trying to pull me away.

Aggy is dead. Aggy is dead. Aggy, Agatha Olivia, my heart, my sister, I would go with you anywhere, don’t leave me, don’t leave me, don’t leave me.

I push Elfleda in front of me, even though I am not sure why I am suddenly so insistent that she go through with this. Perhaps it is the magic of the night, calling us all to the sacrifice. The giant rock altar adorned with our blood. The beach and the sea, calling for more.

The balance must be kept. We give our blood.

Elfleda goes before me, saying her name much too loud because she is afraid she will not be loud enough. Some people laugh. She’s not the first to do it and she won’t be the last. Better to shout than to mumble, like some do, and have to repeat yourself.

I go up after her. I say my name. I say Ceol’s. My finger is slit and my blood drips. I can’t see the stain in the dark, with the flickering light, but I imagine it spreading dark and slow into the rest of it, and all of our blood mixing with the blood of generation after generation, both the living, the remembered, and the dead that have been gone so long that their names can not be recalled.

I step down off the rock, and as I am stepping, I catch a glimpse of a face. Or I think I do. I look, but I can’t find her again in the crowd. Elfleda has found me again and is saying something, but there is the rush of the sea in my ears and too many faces crowding my vision, and I don’t hear a single word of it.

The rest of the riders step up and give their names and step down, and everyone trickles back down the hill for more drink or to go back home. I hang back, looking for the face I thought that I saw. I shouldn’t, of course. I should go down to the safety of my warm bed and forget, like I always do, that she exists. Except my forgetting is a half forgetting, and there are two silhouettes by the larger bonfire, and I walk towards them, like the fates are singing it, and it’s no will of my own.

Her hair is straight and dark, longer than ever. It’s tossing in the wind, and so is her smile, a laugh framed by flashing white teeth. It’s something that he’s said that’s made her laugh, though I couldn’t hear what it was, and I don’t recognize the man. He must be from Hastoway. I know every man in Skarmouth. I used to know nearly everyone in Hastoway as well, but I don’t go there anymore unless I have to. Because she lives there now, and I don’t want her to think that I’m stalking her or something. She might curse me if she did, and though I don’t know what I believe about old Thisby superstitions, I believe in her curses. I wonder if she is cursing me now, as I see her fling a piece of paper over the cliff edge.

She turns to look at me, because she has known this whole time that I am standing here, because she knew I saw her from the rock, because she knew I would stay and find her. And the man beside her is a slap in my face and her flashing smile is another, and the paper in the wind is a taunt, because it could be me, but I’m not to know.

“Jan,” she says, and her voice is cutting, sliding like razor sharp ice down my spine. “What a fancy to see you here! How are the crabs?”

I frown at her, and don’t answer her question, because she doesn’t care to have in answered anyway. “Why are you here?” I ask.

She laughs, high and breaking. “Oh Jan, you know I always come to the festival,” she says, linking one of her arms through one of the arms of her man.

I try not to look at him, so that I will not remember the details of his face, so that I can not be up all night thinking about how much I hate every feature of it.

She knows I am not talking about the festival. I am asking why she is here, on this cliff, waiting for me. I know she comes to the festival every year. It’s yet another reason why I can no longer enjoy it. Every year I dread seeing her, and every year, she makes sure that I do. Or at least that I think I do. Sometimes I’m not sure. Sometimes I can convince myself that it wasn’t her after all. But she doesn’t usually talk to me.

Her dark eyes are watching me, and they don’t laugh like her mouth does. Once upon a time I hurt her. She is not the forgiving sort. I think she would eat my heart on a stick and sew my skin into voodoo dolls if given the chance.

She doesn’t answer my question. “Are you riding this year?” she asks, her voice still cold and threatening underneath her merry facade.

I incline my head in answer, then say, “Do you have something to tell me? If not I’ll be on my way.”

There are clouds in her eyes and she frowns momentarily, but then her wicked grin flashes again and she tosses her head, sending her hair flying at all angles in the wind.

“I did not summon you here, Yannick Maguire. You walked this way of your own accord. What makes you think I have something to tell you? I have nothing to say to you now, nor the next day, nor the one after that.”

The fire dances across her dark skin and her stance challenges me to speak. I am not going to argue with her yet again over how sorry I am. I have given up on making her see it. I turn with a shake of my head, and walk back down the hill, the sound of her laughter pushing me faster.

I don’t sleep much that night, and when I do sleep, she is there, laughing at me and threatening me with a long and jagged knife. I wake up in a sweat every time.

When I get up in the morning, or as close to morning as I can make it, I look in the mirror and find puss coming out of my right eye. I clean it and pull back my eyelid to find the scratch. It doesn’t look any worse than I’ve had before; perhaps an eyelash, or a bit of hay. I tie a bandana over it in a makeshift eye patch to keep the cold out of it while I ride, and think of the bit of paper tossed into the sea. Though I am sure she would curse me with more than a scratched eye.

As I clean Ceol’s stall after our ride, I ponder on how I used think that her anger meant that she still loved me. Why flaunt her new boyfriend if she doesn’t want me back? But I’ve given up on that idea. She is full of pain and hate, and I, it seems, am her primary outlet.

Ceol can tell that I am distracted, and is watching me more than his breakfast. I remind him that I am watching too, even though my thoughts are elsewhere, by spitting on my hand and pressing it against his skin between shoveling. Spit, press, whisper, shovel, shovel, shovel, spit, press, whisper, wipe my brow, shovel, shovel, shovel. The smell is something I can not describe. I clean it every other day, and have been doing this for years, and still it makes me want to gag. If I didn’t have to keep spitting on my hand, I would tie the bandana I have over my eye over my mouth and nose instead. Another smell I can not get used to. Fish, blood, brine, death; I can handle them all. Digested meat and wounds? Not so much.

When I go home, my mother will hold her nose and tell me to get in the shower straight quick, and that I smell like sin. I will ask her how she knows what sin smells like. She will make a face at me, still holding her nose.

Aggy doesn’t understand how we can go through our days with the same amount of repetition, how we can stand to say the same things to each other over and over, how we can laugh at the same old jokes. For Aggy, every day is a new quest into the unknown. My mother finds comfort in habit. I’m not sure why I do it; perhaps to forget that the days are passing. If every day looks somewhat the same, I can forget that they are stacking up, and that we are all getting older. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not that at all.

Mona and I did the same thing, and she said it was because we were ageless and recurring. She has a strange set of beliefs, that one. One of them is that we live our lives over and over in different bodies. I whispered in her ear once, when we were young and still growing into our bodies and hiding in a blanket fort in someone’s hayloft, “Am I in love with you in every lifetime?” and she’d looked shy and then kissed me on the mouth and said she didn’t know for sure, but she thought so.

Something in my chest aches. I shut Ceol’s stall door harder than I mean to behind me, and make him jump.

I’ve got to get her out of my head.

Mona. Mona Claire Lawrence. I met her in the first grade, when I accidentally stepped on her toes while trying to get in line and she raised a hissing fit. I had to woo her with flowers and beseech her with undignified begging for forgiveness for a week before she would even look at me. She has enchanted me from the start.

We got in our fair amount of fights as we grew up, but we were inseparable. I usually had to make the first move of apology, but I would also usually find her in a puddle of tears, already ready to repent her wrongs, so long as I also repented mine.

I remember that she slapped me when I first tried to kiss her when we were nine. I remember that she kissed me of her own accord when we were ten. I remember that we were both so overwhelmed by the experience and the teenage hormones that were only just starting to peek their heads into our systems that we didn’t try it again for a long while.

I remember playing tag on the beach in the summer, and the lopsided swing we tied up in a tree in her front yard. I remember the day her father died in the races, and when she took a boat to the mainland with her sickly mother, only to find out that she had a brain tumor, and that it had progressed to the point where there was nothing that they could do. I remember that she cried every day until her mother died, but didn’t cry one day after.

We were sitting on the cliffs one day, both twenty two, perhaps three months after her mother had died, and we could still think of nothing else.

“If we had the equipment to detect her cancer here sooner, they could have operated,” Mona said. She’d said it before. We still hadn’t found an answer to the statement.

“We should start a fund,” I said, struck with sudden inspiration, “To build a clinic, to get doctors, to have yearly screenings or something. For everyone on the island.”

She gave a dry laugh and shook her head. “Who would pay those doctors, Jan? Who would donate to build a clinic? There aren’t enough rich men on this island for that.”

“There has to be something we can do,” I said, tense with the fire rushing through my young and love filled veins.

“We can educate people on how to eat right. We can spread knowledge on herbs and oils and encourage people to see the doctors on the mainland-”

“But your mom did all those things! Well, except make trips to the mainland. But no one has money for that.”

“She didn’t always eat right. When she was small, she ate just like everyone else. It was my father and the books he brought that changed her ways.”

“I just don’t know that turmeric and oils can cure cancer, Mona.”

“No one knows how to cure cancer! That’s why people are still dying! But I would rather die from cancer surrounded by crystals and incense than in a sterile room in a radioactive shell of a body, wouldn’t you?”

I shut my mouth, realizing that the topic was too close to grief to really be discussed, and because she wouldn’t like my answer. Because I would rather not die either of those ways.

I would rather die with my blood spread out on the beach.

I’ve been standing against the side of the barn, picking blood from underneath my nails and frowning in memory. I shake myself, and shake circulation back into my cold feet and hands. I pull my beanie down further over my ears and my prematurely receding hairline, which only started more recently which means Mona has been spared the sight of it. I stop myself from thinking what she would say about it, both now and way back when, before I disbelieved in her dreams and she broke free of me.

I walk to the church and try to stop thinking about how I could believe in a cancer clinic, but not in a coffee shop that also sold oils and supplements, or the day she packed up for Hastoway, or all the times people have mentioned, to me or around me, how well her small business is doing.

I told her that there were not enough Hippies on Thisby to support such a thing outside of the festival, but I guess there were more in Hastoway than I knew about. Or maybe she’s slowly converting the whole town to her ways.

I push through the heavy wooden doors and leave my thoughts outside. I let the silence swallow me. And then I sit at my organ, and play. Somewhere along the way, I find the song I’ve been trying to write. I miss both lunch and dinner. Aggy peeks in on me, but knows better than to interrupt me, and leaves again. I scribble notes furiously and mark them out, ball up pieces of paper and toss them away in frustration, then chase them down again and smooth them out… but at the end of the day, I accomplish what I had begun to despair of as being impossible. I don’t think it will make any sense to anyone but myself, but I think that it’s better that way.