The Good People

Her whole body ached. It often did after a night of keening. As soon as Nance left any corpse house, a great, pulsing headache would swell in her skull. ’Tis the borrowed grief, thought Nance. To stand in the doorway between life and death racks the body and bleeds the brain.

Time no longer seemed to tread past in measured steps, but flung forward and back.

Sometimes, in the company of suffering, Nance felt things. Maggie had called it an inward seeing. The knowledge.

During the wake, the women had told her that the grief would subside. Nóra hated them for it. There was a void there, she understood now. How had she lived her whole life and not noticed it! A sea of loneliness that sang a siren song to the bereaved. What a gentle thing it would be to give into it and drown. What an easy keel into the abyss. How qu

Maggie had always taught her to stay away until she was summoned.

Just as day is joined to night, so does the year have its seams.’

she had understood, finally, why people feared the darkness. It was an open door, and you could step through it and be changed. Be touched and altered.

Maggie began to show her the way in which the world was webbed; how nothing lived in isolation.

We still have need of the old ways and knowledge.’