It is the end of the world and I am here to take you home

Mary Cahill. You’d say she was in County Mayo. You’d say it was March 1847.

She is six years old and the second of her sisters to die. The hearth in her room has been grey ash for two days. No one has come to light it since Bríd was carried out. Her mouth is green at the corners from the nettles she has boiled with her own hands, and there is more hair on her straw pillow now than her head. She misses her mother. She wonders why her mother is not here to sing to her.

To her I give: My witness, and the song that her mother sang to her, every night she could. Seoithín, Seo Hó. A turf fire built up the way her Da used to build it, before. Dry wool against her shins. Stirabout oats with melted butter on top, and buttermilk cold in a tin cup, and a basket of potatoes from before the blight — white and floury and burst open in the steam. I give her an egg. I give her her mother’s arms. I give her her mother’s voice saying codail, a chuisle — sleep, my pulse — and her mother staying, staying until she sleeps.

Mary is finished. Mary comes home. She is number eleven trillion three hundred and fifty-six billion two hundred and thirty-one million four hundred and twelve thousand and nine.

This is the work. I do it for everyone.

https://nataliercargill.substack.com/p/it-is-the-end-of-the-world-and-i