Sublime

She does not take her mother’s hand. Instead she finds herself repeating a line she read once, in a poem, in a book on a shelf in a house where she spent no more than a few illicit hours. Everything tends towards iron.

Memories had a long half-life.

with the hurts that had come, the troubles that had built, with the loss of hope and absence of trust and with a mental incapacitation over which nobody seemed willing or able to prevail.

It would be her home for the next seven years, until the Great Storm brought Charlie to her door. The cottage had been derelict in those days, and she’d had no money to restore it, not that she’d wanted to. She had only wanted the windmill. She’d moved right in. She only had a couple of bags, and nowhere else to go and she’d simply slotted herself

And they were familiar with death. In her small house Nóra could see that her neighbours were making room for sorrow in the way they knew to be best.