0001

It felt like falling. I sat up with the taste of brine in my mouth and frowned. Had I screamed? I thought I could hear an echo of my own voice. Nothing moved in the bedroom. the door was closed and the window had allowed in a triangle of moonlight which lay across the duvet. I could not remember the dream; I never did. All I had was the fading taste of salt in my mouth. My heart was racing and I got gulps of air, as if I had surfaced from somewhere deeper than I had thought. The echo faded. But I knew the word. I knew what I had cried out as I woke. 

Aoife. 

I got dressed in the first leggings and hoodie I could find and pulled sneakers on in the hallway. I grabbed my keys and took the lift down to the car. In a few minutes, I was driving up and out onto the main road, turning left towards Howth Head. The Moon was racing between light clouds and Jupiter stood high above the Summit. There was nobody else on the road. It was 3 in the morning. I leaned on the accelerator. 

The Bailey lighthouse swept the shoreline as I turned onto the driveway towards my childhood home. A old Georgian mansion, built for the architect of Howth Castle in the seventeenth hundreds, it was a brooding dark facade even in the daylight. I parked at the corner but did not enter. The house was dark; my father and his carer fast asleep. My sister and her boyfriend, Luke, lived together in a camper van on the grounds at the back of the house, in the middle of the apple orchard my mother had planted twenty years before. I made my way down the path beside the house and the Moon winked out of sight behind the chimney stack. 

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004

  I stood for the longest moment. Empty and motionless, the Earth and the Sun froze, the gears turning the whole galactic plane halted and I stood over her in thin moonlight, my dead sister and I. Time resisted me. Pressure built within me, a cry rising from my heart and my will to stay in the present, a present filled with my sister’s touch and laugh, her twinkling laughter and her easy, simple habits, a present defined by our shared lives, snapped in two and fell away. My blood froze. A white envelope stood between the candles. My name was hand-written in a curling, winged-letter.  “Jesus Christ. What the fuck is this, Aoife? One of your fucking jokes?” I leaned over, filled with sudden hope, and covered her hands with mine. The cold from her flesh was so intense it drew a shocked confirmation from my lips and I screamed. I shook her body and willed her eyes to open, her chest to rise, her voice to fill the air.  I was dreaming. Please. Let this be a dream. -- We do not...
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0002

My sneakers crunched across the narrow gravel path. The hill rose like a black curtain, blocking the orange glow of the city. The Moon filled the darkness with a silvery sketch of the apple trees laid in lines across the grass behind the house. The blossoms seemed to cup every drop of moonlight and amplify it. I walked through the glow towards the dark cabin where my sister and her boyfriend lived.  I noticed Luke's motorbike was missing. I hissed her name. "Aoife. Aoife!"  Nothing stirred. I stood back from the door and tried to peer through the windows but I could see nothing. Maybe they weren't here. They were probably out at some rave or some Beltane celebration. That was almost exactly where they were. I smiled. What the fuck was I doing out here? I came here on auto-pilot.  I should go, before they return or I wake up Nancy, my father's nurse. She slept at the back of the house and could hear a mouse twitch.  But I reached up around the bark of the nearest a...
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