The Green Road

I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad

Because that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault.

He slept like a shout.

Because wars you can do, and famines you can do and floods are relatively easy, but no one survives when the cook scratches his arse and then decides not to bother washing his hands.

But was talking aloud allowed?

Far below were the limestone flats they called the Flaggy Shore; grey rocks under a grey sky, and there were days when the sea was a glittering grey and your eyes could not tell if it was dusk or dawn, your eyes were always adjusting. It was like the rocks took the light and hid it away. And that was the thing about Boolavaun, it was a place that made itself hard to see.

Beauty, in glimpses and flashes, that is what the soul required. That was the drop of water on the tongue.

If I am a fool, he said, Then let me be a great fool and not a small one.

paused in the ineluctable presence of the other, and inhaled.

There was something out of kilter with his mother's happiness, as though a light had been switched on by a passing stranger, and left to illuminate an empty room.

It was a task more than a burden. Once you have actually carried a dead man you are happy enough to leave him down, let them put the box into the damn ground.

Hanna was surprised by the warmth of the chicken's feet, that were scaly and bony and should not be warm at all. She could feel her father laughing at her, as he left her to it and went into the house. Hanna held the chicken away from herself with both hands and tried not to drop the thing as it flapped in the wind and twisted over the space where its head used to be. One of the cats already had the fleshy cockscomb in its little cat's teeth, and was running away with the head bobbing under its little white chin. Hanna might have screamed at all that - at the dangling, ragged neck and the cock's outraged eye - but she was too busy keeping the corpse from jerking out of her hands. The wings were agape, the russet feathers all ruffled back and showing their yellow under-down, and the body was shitting under the black tail feathers, in squirts that mimicked the squirting blood.

Do not sigh, do not weep!

And he did. Billy knew that, even if he did not love Greg, even if he had other guys, and other plans for the long term, he would still do this thing. He would help Greg in his last months, or years. And he might resent it but he would not regret it: because this was the thing that was given him to do.