Migrations

It’s almost dawn when he takes this night and destroys it with naught but a handful of words, as most things are destroyed.

I don’t know how she found the money, but not long after we moved back to Galway, and there I spent the first decade of my life in a wooden house so close to the sea I was able to tune my swift child’s pulse to the shhh shhh of the neap and spring tides.

It has been decided by our leaders that economic growth is more important. That the extinction crisis is an acceptable trade for their greed.”

And that is true, but I have been a casualty of it far longer than he has.

I’m introduced to Samuel, a portly man in his late sixties with a luscious head of red locks, then Anik, a slender Inuit man.

Ennis Malone. Captain of the Saghani.

It’s the wilderness within that demands I survive.

He’s opened the cage door I closed on myself and now I’ll fly, I’ll have to.

He isn’t John Torpey, frightened of having a wife who was wilder than he was, punishing her for it and living a life of regret.

She wanted me to go back to the sea, so at least one of us could live.”