The Wild Hunt

She suspected that nobody still left on this island really deserved the blissful ignorance that was prerequisite to that slow and simple life anymore.

The day dawned blue and blurry. A light frost on the grass, a pale, clear morning. It was the first of November, and the sluagh were gone. The light trickled over the island slowly. It brushed against the ruined church spire and dripped down to the memorial, reaching into the crevices of the names writ therein. It poked through curtains and shutters to creep along countertops and kiss sleeping foreheads. It ran along the high street, knocked on the door, danced over the boats in the harbour, and made a sprint up the hill away from the village. It ricocheted through the fields and through the trees, paused reverently at the standing stones, rocketed up to the ancient cathedral where the seagulls swooped, keening.

You don’t sound happy, mo ghrád,” he had told her over her landlady’s telephone, about a year after she’d left. She wasn’t, not even then, though there was still the buoyant hope that one day it would slip into place like a gear in a clock. But she hadn’t gone in search of happiness. Happiness was at home, on the island, in the midnight suns of summer, the winter skies dancing with lights...

No matter how hard one tried, this island was not a place of leaving easily. It clung to a person like dew. He was still here, always still here

One morning Áine had sailed out of their lives and the next the Welleses stopped talking about her. But she lingered. There were parts of her that were too well woven into the fabric of their lives to excise neatly