Away

If she had been asked to describe him, she would have said that he was the exact spot where the sea touches land, the precise moment of the final reach of the surf. That was the place and time of him. She would forever, then, seek shorelines and beaches.

They represent the most dangerous kind of shape changers: those who cannot see, because of darkness beyond the gesture of the moment

Old Eileen leaned forward in her chair, thrusting her face closer to the child who had been gradually approaching her. "Where is the centre of the world?" she abruptly demanded. Esther stood silently in front of her, holding onto a book she had forgotten to put on a table. She did not know the answer to the riddle. "The place where you stand," Old Eileen said. The place where you stand is the centre of the world.

Two mourning doves somewhere near the decaying barn now resume their lifelong task of attempting to perfect the sound of loss.

where the exquisite sorrow of pleasure had first made itself known to her

One by one the leaves of the planted fields there turned over. Had anyone been watching they would have seen the beginnings of a black stain speckling otherwise healthy foliage. As it was, one small boy, playing with stones and sticks and a puddle of rainwater, lifted his head and sniffed the air, unable to identify the new perfume, a portent carried on the wind.

The women of this family leaned towards extremes.

As the sky behind the Eddy Match Factory across the river filled with light, the steady timbre of the water and rapids became sentences spoken in a soft female voice and Eileen accepted, without surprise, the presence of her mother's lost words. So this is what it is to be away, her mother's voice told her. You are never present where you stand. You see the polished dishes in your kitchen cupboard throwing back the hearth light, but they know neither you nor the meals you have taken from their surfaces. Your flagstones are a series of dark lakes that you scour, and the light that touches and alters them sends you unspeakable messages. Waves arch like mantles over everything that burns. Each corner is a secret and your history is a lie.