le Aisling Ní Choibheanaigh Nic Eoin

Líon na Bearnaí

by Ferdia Foley

‘Christ, he wouldn’t encourage you to come back, would he?, she muttered as they clambered through the crowds rushing out the doors of St. Ultan’s. A large, pre-emancipation era building originally constructed in a cruciform shape, the church was re-ordered and clumsily squared after Vatican II. The removal of reredos and railings remained controversial amongst many parishioners.

‘Keep the head down and nobody will see us’. Why should she chat with Dervla Farrell when their children weren’t in school anymore? Why listen to Linda Clarke’s incredulous screeching, ‘Is that really you?? My GAWD, I haven’t seen YOU here in ages!!’, when their children weren’t even children anymore? She didn’t know why she was there. It’s Christmas, she thought, you had to do something. Sure, it’s only once a year.

She thought of her parents, their complete and pious devotion. Christmas wasn’t Christmas without a midnight mass. Sunday wasn’t Sunday and Wednesday wasn’t Wednesday. The dim light of a sacred heart stretched far across her childhood. It didn’t mean much to her now, but you have to have something. She was glad they were dead before it kicked off.

Every day for the past few months the Report was discussed on the radio. Even the shock-jocks covered it. ‘Guess this sound! That’s right, it’s the arse falling out of Catholic Ireland!’ None of her children went to mass anymore, and she couldn’t blame them. Only baptised to get into school, Communions and Confirmations were just for the craic. It’d be harder for her to let it all go. But it takes time, she thought, it takes time.

They drove quick out the car park, careening around crowds gathered in circles discussing the Christmas. An awkward priest stood holding mince pies and cold sausage rolls. Not even the Eucharistic Ministers had a kind word to say as comparisons with the recently relocated Father Kearney spread around the yard. ‘He hasn’t half the pizazz as old Baz’, ‘I’m sure I saw him wince at the wine’, ‘Pathetic, that’s right, Pathetic’.

The New Year began and the radio switched back to old news. The M3 was almost complete, despite a decade of protest from environmentalists, academics, and

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artists. ‘Gobshites and hippies’, as one councillor put it. The motorway, which would cut straight through Tara, would slice her husband’s commute in half. It’d be nicer, too, getting into town a bit faster, but she’d never admit that in public. She sympathised with the protestors, even though she couldn’t connect with the more paganistic arguments delivered by tree-huggers and greasy-haired fans of The Hothouse Flowers and Clannad.

‘The motorway which will link the towns of Cavan and Kells with Dublin, will run through farmland within sight of Ardbraccan’s ancient monastic site - she turned down the sound. It was already nearly February and she had plenty else to think about. Her class would make their Communion soon and parents had demanded free tea and biscuits for their next Oíche Eolais, scheduled for St. Ultan’s on the 31st. Apparently catering was Muinteoir’s job, alongside educating their children and freezing herself for two hours a month in a strangely shaped church - for free. After a lengthy phone call, the nervous new priest agreed to provide two tankards of tea, while Muinteoir would bring in the milk. If his mass was bad, nothing compared to that long conversation with Father Hyssop about Avonmore milk’s superiority over Tesco’s Own Brand.

For all her trouble, she was adored by the children. Great healer immaculate, she cleaned scrapes and acknowledged big bruises, ‘Yes that is a very big bruise Daithí, but you needn’t punch yourself to keep it black and blue’. Possessor of great sacred knowledge, Muinteoir answered all questions. ‘Muinteoir, what’s the Irish for Jaffa Cake?’, ‘Muinteoir can fish sing songs or just hum tunes?’, ‘Muinteoir, Muinteoir, Muinteoir! An bhfuil cead agam cáca Jaffa le do thoil?’ What she didn’t know, Google promptly told her. So when the 31st came around, she fulfilled her annual tradition and once again watched the instructional video, ‘How to make a Brigid’s Day Cross (Irish Mythology Explained)’. Prepared for tomorrow’s class, she packed up her things to go home.

Engine on. Heater on. Radio, turned up nice and loud. ‘It’s not just the Hill of Tara that matters. It is but the central focus of a wider and deeply significant cultural landscape’. She tuned it all out, thinking only of getting home quick and enjoying her three private hours between school and St. Ultan’s. Her old dog Phelim greeted her as she came in the front door.

A springer spaniel/labrador, Phelim was a muscle-bound bullet for most of his life. Impossible to walk because of his strength, they’d simply let him run loose out at Tara to terrorise children, petrify sheep, and piss on the famed Stone of Destiny.

He was older now, although not any bit wiser. She thought he might’ve been clipped on the head by a car, and though the vet said he was fine, he seemed a bit absent. A happy dog, but the kind that barks at his farts. Gentler, now he was almost fourteen, he couldn’t be all that strong anymore. She took out the leash and stuck it onto his collar. Minimal resistance, she’d risk it.

‘Ballachmore Bog - Dogs must be kept on lead - Wildlife Reserve, No Shooting Please’. Ten minutes down the road and she’d never been out to the bog. She strolled in quite careful, testing the waters with her thoughtless old dog who seemed quite happy to stroll. Passing by others just finished their walk, she noticed the knee-high dirt on their clothes. ‘Better be careful not to get mucky, might not get home in time for a bath’. Phelim stared on with his simpleton smile and they walked on together, into the bog.

‘How’s she cuttin?’, a small chorus met her at every new corner as workmen wheeled out barrows of stone and joggers jiggled on past her. Dogs scrambled on slanted legs to get a sniff at Phelim, as he snapped at orangey-yellow butterflies with stainedglass window wings. ‘The Marsh Fritillary’, she read on a sign, ‘native to this bog, is the only protected butterfly species in Ireland - please leave them be!’ She loved the smell of the bog, like smoke, stout, and her mother burning her bones before bed by the AGA.

Ten minutes since passing the last JCB and the chorus had faded away. ‘It must nearly be time to go home’, and they wandered until the ground, though still marshy, was bogland no more. The landscape familiar and the sky still the same, she felt suddenly lost in a lonely, strange place. Surrounded by endless fields of grey-green, the night fell quick on the land all around her. She walked until Phelim stopped in his tracks. His first real resistance to the lead, it slipped from her wrist and the dog ran away, bounding into a field. Seeing small figures, pale in the evening, she was afraid the old dog saw a lamb. So she ran and she ran and she tripped and she stumbled and she fell into thick, squelching dirt.

Her phone told the time and little else helpful, coverage is no good in that kind of place. A half hour left until meeting the parents, she sat in the muck with her head in her hands. Machine-gun lungs began thumping the air right beside her. All drenched in water, Phelim’s smile was stretched tight against his dim-witted face. He accepted one rub of relief before taking off again at a pace she could follow. The lead lying useless around her left hand. They stopped at a well, a small hole in the ground surrounded by heavy, black boulders. Freshly bloomed coltsfoot grew

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just out of the water, while a stream fed the oak, yew and beeches around them. While Phelim drank, she sat tracing the markings on a boulder beside her.

‘Brigid’s knee-prints, or that’s what they’ve told me, left there as she drank from the well. I hope you’re not here trying to bless it, y’know, it doesn’t belong to the Church’. She stared up at the long, grey-haired woman wearing a Leonard Cohen t-shirt and filthy, black wellies. ‘This is the daughter of Dagda’s, Brigid the Goddess, you should know there’s no church-folk allowed! And I’d appreciate you removing your dog from her well, there’s great healing and knowledge that flows through that water’. This was clearly one of those odd, hippy women who smoked marijuana, didn’t wear bras, and watched TnaG.

‘I’m sorry’, she said and pulled Phelim away, now apparently infused with great Celtic wisdom. She felt stupid explaining how she’d been lost ten minutes away from her home but the woman’s face quickly softened. ‘I’m sorry for snapping, I get little peace from the new priest above. Looking for a miracle to distract from that business. But of course, I hadn’t realised there was a stray sod there myself, you can blame those feckers for that now as well!’ The woman shouted as if there were spies in the trees. ‘An fóidín mearaí’, she explained, clocking the teacher’s uncertain expression, ‘the sod that sent you out all confused. Denied the burial of their unbaptised children, those poor grieving mothers must’ve gone out to the bog. Walking over those graves can send you down a very bad path’, she leaned over Phelim and gave him a tussle, ‘you’re lucky you had himself there to protect you’. She didn’t think much of the woman’s weird rambling, but she grinned at the idea of Phelim, Knight Errant. Was eating your vomit part of the chivalric code? She wasn’t so sure.

A small cottage, left by her aunt, the woman invited them in. There was a clock, a table, and some kind of sculpture all glossed with the same varnish and made of dark wood. ‘Pieces I’ve pulled from the bog and restored, there’s more to be gotten from the earth than just fuel’. A bit over-dramatic, but she couldn’t resist this strange woman’s charm. From the rafters was hanging a large Brigid’s Cross and noticing her confusion at this straw-crucifixion, the old woman explained, ‘There’s plenty of things we’ve mixed in with religion, but for me the cross means something else. It’s a connection with the women who made them before me. It’s important, I think, to have something’. The Múinteoir agreed and recalled her mother spreading reed in front of their house to protect them from fire and storms. They traded similar stories of Biddy Boys and Brídeóg dolls as she remembered old touches she’d long since forgotten. ‘Whether Christian or not’, the old woman concluded, ‘it’s more part of ourselves than of them. You won’t catch them doing this craic out in Rome’.

She drove her out to St. Ultan’s with half a litre of milk about ten minutes before the meeting should end. It seemed that some of the parents, with the pandering priest’s full blessing, were intoxicated by the good grace of God. Father Kearney’s spirit cupboard had long been discussed but under the new fawning Father all mysteries were revealed. Embedded at last, Father Hyssop hiccupped as he held the kind woman’s arm and sneered, ‘So you’re the aul bitch that’s been hoarding our well’.

The kids, having learned about the Salmon last year, were fascinated by Phelim’s new, magical knowledge and crowded the dog who stared into space, vacant as ever. Even as Phelim relieved himself against Our Lady Immaculate, young Daithí solemnly whispered ‘uisce coisreacain’ and blessed himself. When Múinteoir sat down with her husband at home, she swore she was mortified, but she smiled as she said it and the dog got two dinners.

‘While sitting by the deathbed of a dying Pagan Chieftain, Saint Brigid weaved a cross out of rushes, and told him the word of the Lord. Before he died, the Chieftain was Christian’. She x’d out of the tab and closed her computer. As she stared at her class of small children, each one smiling with a cross in their hands, she decided to tell them a different story entirely. It was about her own childhood, making circular crosses for mothers in labour, three-pronged crosses for cattle and sheep, and four-pronged crosses to welcome the Spring. She never spoke a single word of the Lord.

After big break, she handed out sheets,

Líon na Bearnaí

Is saoire ______ í Feabhra 1, ag ceiliúradh ______.

________ a thugtar uirthi.

(February 1st is a ______ holiday, celebrating the life of _______. It is known as ________)

Aimsir Spring Robin

by Chris Moody

A Little Chat About Little Books

by Killian Beashel

Erica Van Horn, I always have an audience for my book (Ballybeg: Coracle, 2014)

Francis Van Maele, Achill Island Sheep (Dugort: Redfoxpress, 2019)

If you look at them sometimes they look at you, not that nice is it? I’m not too sure about it myself. Naturally, they often keep their eyes glued to the ground, biting and pulling the grass into their mouths, and that just seems nicer, I think. On occasion they look at nothing in particular, maybe this tree or that, the road, the cars, the brow of a hill and the horizon and beyond that again.

A World Cup without Scotland is like a pastoral without sheep. No sheep!

I can hear a crow scrabbling above on the roof, rooting around for something, some twig in the gutter for a nest perhaps.

They’re two little books about animals. One of the books is about cows, the other is about sheep. At any rate, one book is full of pictures of cows and the other is filled with pictures of sheep, whether they’re about cows and sheep is a whole other matter. They are both small books, and thus ripe for a comparative reading. Van Horn’s features pictures of cows in a field local to her in rural Tipperary. It is entitled I always have an audience for my book. The other book is entitled Achill Sheep, and it ups the ante production-wise by daring to be a hardback, albeit a very little hardback, pocket sheep. The photographs are by somebody called Francis Van Maele.

There is of course the temptation to suggest that they’re both rather simple jokes. They probably are, really.

Van Horn and Van Maele, The Two Vans – in town for one night and one night only! Look at the animals laugh, look at Ireland and laugh, it is all stupid.

On a drive through Connemara as a child, sitting in the back seat of the car, we passed a sign pointing towards a farm somewhere near Clifden. ‘Adopt A Sheep’, the sign read, as if they were an endangered species of tiger. A good enterprising

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Are these good books? I have only ever engaged with them in very simple ways. Van Horn’s book was often used as an item of decoration, something funny to put on the edge of the coffee table that friends could look at and laugh. It’s a good joke. Van Maele’s book has been a bit different so far. There is no obvious joke in the title so it doesn’t offer quite the same capabilities as a lazy item of household prop-based humour. I’m a lazy reader no doubt.

My housing estate used to be a farm, as is tradition. It would’ve had rolling hills, sheep, a babbling brook. For about a decade the abandoned farmhouse stood in a field at the edge of the estate, gradually growing more ragged with each passing year. When I moved into the house, apparently, you could still see sheep from my bedroom window. I was a young child, and I don’t remember that. The old farmhouse is gone now too and a small development of houses (new ones without chimneys) are in its place. A government minister lives in one of them, apparently.

Why take photos of sheep? You would think they all look alike but they don’t. Some are small, some are big. Some have curled, ornate horns.

I would love to make art for cows, but I don’t think I have the capabilities.

Syncretism

by Maggie O’Shea

See (iii) of Notes for description.

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Spark Bird

by Ursula O’Sullivan-Dale

Out on Lough Beg, where winds cools on the surface of water, the man is looking for a black-tailed godwit. He knows a hidden place among the wet grasslands, trusted to him and his Father only, a gift of the lake. The man hopes to find her there, in wintering feathers.

The godwit is a spark bird, the first bird that kindled his love to watch. From her, he learned to bottle every sound within him and float in the silence, tuned for a specific call. He learned to lose his body among plants, and become passive, paralysed.

When his Dad first brought him here, she was scraping short plants together in the muddy grass to shield her young. They were unhatched, their hope of living bound up in a fragile shell. Back then, she had a long bill and a grey back, which burst into orange at the head and neck. Nesting, then, in warm spring water. Now he has come back for her, looking for some feeling, locked in some place from his past. A place where joy was wet and leaking into him. He rarely comes back to the Lough now, and the last few times he’s made it he’s not seen her, becoming lost as he roams through his memories, trying to pull some knowledge of her from them.

Still, he knows she’s not dead. The curve of her wing enfolds his heart, which is still beating.

He can never fully know how much he misses the Beg⁠—as his Dad⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ called it—till he returns, feet wet in the grass, wading into freshwater. Until he meets cattle, grazing on the filmy line of the horizon. Sometimes he looks to the white spike of Church Island, which some say goes all the way back to Saint Patrick. He hears his Dad’s voice telling him this every time he finds that pale shape in his eye, about a saintly passage through a river, and into the heart of a lake. This is the only place where he can feel those familiar chords, stroking through the rushes and into him. There’s something half-remembered in the make-up of the plants, that they can sing that sound back to him, as if he were still a child, and his Father’s voice was at some imperceptible distance. The length of a little leg, dangling on a shoulder.

All those years ago, his Father said, That’s it, there, son. The black-tailed godwit. This is the second time I’ve seen her here, and I think it’s only us that know about this little spot. Keep that secret well, I’ve a feeling she’s in want of no other visitors.

I will, Daddy.

The boy holds his hand in a small fist, and puts the secret in the pocket of his raincoat. He sees the bird his Dad is pointing at and scribbles in his little notebook ‘black taled gotwit’. He never has the heart to change it, looking back on that worn page, feeling as if to alter anything will rip the memory from him altogether.

He came back to this spot as a young man, before he was due to head down to Dublin for college. He left something of himself behind, then, something to be stored and shared among the grasses, the rootstocks and capillaries. Something to be found again in the companionship of wet feathers.

The tiny green cells held his tears for him when, at seventeen, he fell to his knees, and felt the first urge of a man becoming to call out to god. When it wrenched from him the urge to find this being and strangle him, and so to lose himself. When thoughts settled within him of defeat and how he might surrender his body, which was young and broad, to the gaping blue mouth before him.

That thin beam of time trembles through the Lough now, and runs through his duck-feet. It finds the fine branches of lakewater in him that have their roots, their first roots, somewhere deep in the Beg. As it spreads, he is carried in a boat back to that moment, and to all the moments before and after.

Did you know, love, that our black-tailed godwit returns to the same place every year, to bring new life into the world?

And, mammy, the girl ones have longer beaks, to stop the men from taking their food.

His mother nods, glad of her boys’ return. Dinner is ready. Their hands are either cold or wet; the boy is not old enough to know the difference. All he knows is the comfort of his Father’s voice and the heat of the fire.

He comes back now, as a man of his own making, with a son left behind. His wife, who he is pretty sure he loves, minds that precious thing that carries the name of his Father.

In this moment, Friday light swamps the sky, and grey water runs across his eyes. It is lit with carbon, sliding from darkness into pink to white, into a dripping ball of white sun. Thoughts of anything but the present are obliterated, and drain into the everything of water. He blinks, and sees nothing but plain colours of the winter feathers. There is nothing inside him but the brown wet breath of the Lough.

He lets the bird come to the forefront of his mind, and silently calls to it, in its own wicka, wicka, wicka. The damp edges of the lake are close but, now that he is here, they seem to stretch beyond and beyond, like an endless skin. Water runs across

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that skin and weeps into his heart, where it finds his childhood. It opens everything up, and he hides nothing. Like a parent, with a lying child, it knows how to make a passage for the truth and force its passing from his lips.

Somehow, soon, everything will feel complete. Once he finds her, everything will shimmer and living will be his again. Now he must simply wait for it, for when the closed shell, buried in the bank of his chest, clicks and opens.

And so he wades, closing in on that primordial spot, easy work for adult legs. He thinks of how much easier this was, when there were shoulders to carry him.

The more he comes on, bearing towards it, the more he is filled with that euphonious sound. His Father’s heavy footsteps sinking into the many pools of himself, into that first love, that first mud.

Not much further now, into the dark water, and the cycle will be complete. He is almost swimming, trusting the knowledge of his body, of the water’s body, to take him there. He’s only strides away from the marshy shores but can’t see land. There is nowhere to go but through himself, his own murky image, which draws towards it all the light of the water. He passes through its shape, a widening shadow. Yes, he can see it, on the other side—right there. The secret spot, the one only Dad could find. He thinks to himself, I am a man now, with a child of my own, and have found it too.

It is only a few feet away. The length, he realises, of his Father’s body. Stretched ahead of him are those long, long legs.

He wonders why now, as feels the last of himself distending, passing out of him and into shadow, he thinks he hears the kettle boil at home, the sound of his wife’s arms winding around his boy. But this cannot be, because there is no other place.

He goes forwards. The time it takes for him to find the way is an age of man, of oxen yoked in the field, of backs cracking with labour, a world pulsing with the metal rage of industry.

Before the moment is gone, the spot is flooded, and very deep. Or perhaps he has become very small, very low, barely breaking through into the clean edge of day. Passing through the corner of his eye, he suddenly sees it. The image is brown, like the softness growing from the skin of a young bird. The sign of a journey, ended.

She dips her long pink bill, its orange colour leaving with summer’s heat. It winds deep into the water, into a darker shade. The spire of a church on a black day. The wind hums through a hundred feathers of grey-brown, a hundred mourners. The colour of a tie that has been tied, too tight, around the neck of a dead man. A face that never looked so serious, that wasn’t his face, his soul.

But he sees it now. In an arched wing, striped black and white in the moments before flight. He is not anywhere. The water and the marsh keep infinite moments. That’s it, son.

He did not realise how far he had strayed from the surface. In the tremors of his Father’s voice, which reach out for him through the water like a trembling hand, he sees it. The winter plumage of the bird, at last.

The two sounds are now confused, two signals ringing as one through water. He feels himself return to that silent state, which he knows so well, and waits for that wicka, wicka, wicka.

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Fledgling

by Aisling Ní Choibheanaigh Nic Eoin

A child, looking in a steamed mirror, popping jewels of toothpaste into her mouth. This was where you started, the growing-up, grown up you. You aged more with painful events, like the burns you got on your arms when you fell forward into a spring bonfire. That great mass of skin that you couldn’t take your eyes away from, the peeling, the pulling; it went all the way up to your elbows, like a pair of removable gloves. Months after, when you were able to discard the bandages entirely, you sat on the slate steps into the garden, tracing the thick ropes of tissue that went around your arms. They were a deep pink, and shone in any amount of light. You wanted them off you, and took every step you could to ensure that they would one day be off you. You oiled them, buffed them with body scrubs, massaged them with your thumbs. But they remained, and as the years went on, still they remained – on you. As such, you quickly took your place in the community as a cautionary-tale individual; the sort of person that parents tell their children about in an effort to help them avoid your same fate. The sort of person your grandmother would have told you about when you were young, her voice ripe with that strange talent your country has for reducing a person’s entire life to one moment.

This year, on the brink of adulthood, you have given up on the idea of removing them, so embedded are they in your person. You can feel, when you rotate your forearm, these ropes rising and falling as they go over the moving bone. Their weight sits against you, but not in an unpleasant way. Like a new tooth taking the place of an old one; strange to begin with, and then settled so deeply into the bones of you that it becomes normal, usual. You press those arms into the fuel bunker, into the bath where you wash the family dog, into the ground to plant bulbs. You hold them across your chest at night, dreaming of worlds not yet born, of words not yet spoken. Mornings pass, nights pass, and following this same pattern, the months pass. The light increases, the flat space outside your home begins to show signs of movement, that wiggling out of the dirt that all things seem to do eventually.

This evening, while your parents and siblings ready that same spring bonfire, a decade-later version of that spring bonfire that changed your body so profoundly, you sit on a lawn-chair. You feel this changing world as a wave of pink bleeds out from the underside of the sky, loosening those threads that have, until this point in the year, stopped any colour from getting through. You see them, those threads of cloud, reaching and joining the two sides of this verge together –clinging, all sinewy and wet. Looking out to the distant Atlantic, and the grinding of its body against rocks, you watch this spectacle, thinking that the sky seems to be lowering itself towards the earth in the strangest way. Like some spectral vision of atmospheric agitation. Its motion interrupted and then repeated again, in a constant push and pull that allows it to advance its position incrementally; until it appears to be just feet above your heads. You stand, excusing yourself, and walking out the side gate behind the house.

Into the field off the boreen, the overturned water trough rests in its usual place, and you sit on it. The skin on your forearms prickles, as if detecting some current that moves over your body, through the grass. You run your fingers over those ropes of tissue, their little dips and bends familiar now. This is when you notice the hundreds of variations that are suddenly visible within the colour brown. In front of you, in the ground, there appears to be an endless number; there are those that are cold from water, the earth; those that are warm in the orange light; those that have mixed with the purples and greens to become something entirely different, like brush strokes have dragged them together, forced them into one another. And from this colour comes a bird, a darker brown than what is behind it. Another follows it, digging at the damp soil around it, taking no note of you. More begin to gather, out from the nearby shrubbery, down from the branches of ash trees, from behind the trough. Beaks bent, eyes glossy, the feathers of their wings scrunched to keep out the weather. Wind cries as it hits your body and weaves its way through the grasses, and when you look up, you see the clouds directly above you, only inches above your body.

The birds make noises that you feel moving in and out of you. How strange, you think, to see such an amount of them here. No fear, no concern over their proximity to you. You lower your body onto the ground to be closer to them, breathing as quietly as you can. Sitting there in the dirt, at the foot of the old trough, you notice the clouds pushing down, almost against the earth. Is there any way to know where you are, body like a worm against the ground? Are you above or below it? You look up, listening out for the waves that move far from you. Feel them crushing strings of seaweed into the sand, pushing shells onto rocks. Some noise disturbs the birds, and they take off in a single group, their small bodies hitting one another as they go. You are left alone, under this flat sky, the shadows of their wings on the inside of your eyelids.

The noise of that water, or the feeling of it, pushing through the ground. Like a great crunching, a tearing through rock, through roots. It pushes up towards you from the shore, pushes against the huge weight of the cliffs and the stone walls that bound fields. Through this ground, cracking it open until it reaches you. You look, unable to see this split, but hearing it. How has this sound come so far? It’s in my mouth, you think, I can taste it. And you do taste it. It is the taste of something