Sublime

In the west of Ireland there are many stories about ghosts, spirits or fairies who had a special association with particular places; these legends were as natural as the landscape to the mind of the local people.

Easily, he slept; and as he slept, the woman in the photograph took her arm from the pastor’s waist, and crossed the parched lawn towards the camera. Her black skirts, thickly beaded at the hem, obscured the view of Bethesda; then her fine and muddied boots came over the frame, and were first set squarely on the table, then one by one on the floor:

Mutely the chapel looked back at him across a car park glossed by rain. Its door was closed, and newly painted green; beside the door a green bay tree flourished like the wicked in the thirty-seventh psalm. An east wind blowing up the Alder moved the cold illuminated air, and the bay tree danced in its small black bed. The chapel did not dance. Its

Her few clothes hung austerely on a rail, and a television overlooked the foot of the bed; she watched it indiscriminately and with confusion, trying to make Bethesda’s child into an ordinary woman. And indeed she was ordinary, where certain essential matters were concerned – had not believed in hell since the day she’d laughed at the belt in her f

A woman was leaving the asylum on midsummer morning. She went warily down steps leading to a gravel drive, observing her own feet with interest and care, as she might have watched children inclined to run into the road.