The Nimkus Fall Fair proved a huge success. Even some of the town matrons relented at the last minute, or at least before it was too late to enter their exhibits. Most of them grew flowers and vegetable gardens, and they could not pass up the chance to compete against the farm women. But this year, not only the town matrons participated. Miss Carrington entered her crocheted doilies and embroidered pillow case as well as a couple of jars of Saskatoon preserves. She also agreed to be a judge for some of the exhibits, a prestigious job that had always been reserved for two or more of the business men’s wives, or town women from Bradshaw. Millie Osborne was not to be outdone, either. She had worked all through the previous winter and most of the spring, knitting socks and sweaters. Her grown sons had laughed at her, asking if she was trying to get in with the high mucky-mucks around town. But Millie would not be discouraged. “After all,” she told her boys, “Mr. Carson says I have to support the Association now that I’m an Ag member.” “Aw, Maw,” they chided, “you can’t compete with the biddies who live in this town. They’ve been doing this stuff for years.” “You mind your own business, you louts,” Millie said. “My things will look just as nice and tidy as any others on display.” And they did, as her boys were forced to admit when they saw them next to other exhibits on the day of the fair. Pong, the laundryman, did not have anything to exhibit but he worked tirelessly all day, as well as the evening before the fair, helping to set up booths, carrying and fetching, happy just to be of service to Will and Missy Ben. Holding the clipboard that had once been Will’s responsibility, Sarah looked around her at the people gathered on the fair grounds. Many greeted her with a nod or a cheery, “Good day, Mrs. Fielding,” or, from the less reserved ones, “Hi there, Sarah, how’s it going?” Was it her imagination or were there actually more people than there had been last year? She saw Mrs. Thompson leading little David McNeill by the hand, and walked over to them. “I see you have your hands full for the day,” Sarah said, bending to give David a hug.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis — translator, poet, publisher, and apparently a one-person archive of everything Greek literature has ever felt about mortality, love, and the road.
Mara: vequinox has been busy. Today we're moving through modern Greek poetry in translation, then into myth and mortality, and finally into fiction and travel narratives that cross borders both literal and historical.
Pip: Let's start with the poets.
Voices Across the Aegean: Modern Greek Poetry in Translation
Mara: The throughline across these translations is a question: what survives when a poem crosses languages? The Cavafy post gives us one answer through the myth of Achilles and a god who betrays his own prophecy.
Pip: And Cavafy frames it with Plato first, which is a move — citing the Republic to set up a poem about divine bad faith. The quote lands hard: "Yet, he, himself… who sang the hymn… he killed my son."
Mara: That line is Thetis speaking. Apollo sang paeans at her wedding foretelling her son's long life, and then personally went to Troy and killed Achilles. The prophecy and the killing share the same mouth.
Pip: Which is either theology or the oldest recorded case of a conflict of interest.
Mara: The Yannis Ritsos volumes — both Volume V and Volume VI — push into similar territory from a different angle. Volume V gives us the evening star as an eraser moving back and forth over a mistake that never quite disappears, birth and death as a rhythm rather than a sequence.
Mara: Volume VI's "Same Word" watches language itself tremble under its own unfamiliar meaning, like a nerve that shivers and bursts. Ritsos keeps returning to the threshold between sense and silence.
Pip: Tasos Livaditis takes that threshold into a tavern. The bouzouki player in Volume II swears every day he'll turn his life around, and every night the world deepens and pulls him back through the door.
Mara: George Seferis in the Collected Poems gives us crickets ticking out of rhythm, a house full of them, and the line "we don't even whisper, because the machine is speeding before horror and contempt." The anthology Neo-Hellene Poets lands a parable about a bird that can learn every sweet song except the words "I love you."
Pip: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's Selected Poems counts time differently: "I count time with what I've lived and what is forthcoming that resembles the incomparable end. Only, look, the craft and the fisherman can't be separated from the blue."
Mara: Titos Patrikios in Selected Poems is more pointed — "Economic Development" watches emigration and foreign investment rise together while newspapers announce cultural ideals are being maintained. And Nuances holds the sharpest compression: a poem called "Repetitions" that names peace as something a sword erases.
Pip: Red in Black steps outside Greece entirely, finding illumination in Craiova, Romania, through Brancusi sculptures — the Blind Boy and The Kiss — connecting Greek poetic consciousness to Romanian artistic space. That range from Cavafy's Troy to a Romanian museum is the real scope of this project.
Mara: From mythic time to the present tense — which is exactly where the next set of poems lives.
Eros, Entropy, and the Weight of Ending
Pip: This cluster asks what myth and love actually cost — not in the abstract, but in the body, in the moment, in the interruption.
Mara: Medusa opens with a poem called "Gravestone" where Eros descends to a melancholic youth and a widow turns in the moonlight, and then the poem pivots without warning: "Nothing matters more than the armchair craving my body as the widow craves her late husband."
Pip: The domestic interruptions — the faucet, the table, the wife demanding full attention — aren't a joke at the poem's expense. They're the actual argument: desire and the ordinary are not separate territories.
Mara: Entropy's "Eternal Cycle" strips that argument to its bones — earth aging, returning its shine, then embracing each thing on its path toward what it always longed for. Wheat Ears traces the same arc through a single memory: beauty glimpsed through a window, understood only later when years have become dry leaves on a sidewalk.
Pip: Rendition and Life is a Poem hold the stranger registers — one a requiem tracking dawn through alcohol and fear, the other a surrealist marketplace where oaks erect monuments and white rabbits somersault on floating meadows. Hours of the Stars closes it with a prologue about those who never let their glance reach the light, and the chaste people who do.
Mara: That tension between those who see and those who can't — it runs through the fiction too.
Roads Taken Hard: Fiction and Travel Across Borders
Pip: The fiction here is about people in motion — and motion that doesn't stop even when it probably should.
Mara: Ugga frames that with unusual economy: "For the light to change the production must pause and the pause must be produced methodically." Four lines that describe filmmaking and also, quietly, everything else.
Pip: In Turbulent Times gives us Ian Anderson driving furiously south from Lisburn, cursing his own idea the entire way, and not stopping. The road is "drunken," the steering wheel swung "in fury, like a ship's skipper in a storm."
Mara: The rationing detail grounds it precisely in postwar Northern Ireland — no meal over five shillings, no more than three courses, restaurants exempt and resented for it. The historical texture is load-bearing.
Pip: Straits and Turns puts a mechanic behind a fogged window in a Vancouver train yard, rain dripping steadily, "poetically, he'd say." The Circle moves between Baghdad and a new apartment, a move organized with pizzas and a reserved elevator and a view west toward the Pacific.
Mara: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men is the furthest journey — Irish monks in North America, a guide warning that the trip takes five or six seasons and that stragglers get left behind. And Jazz with Ella lands in Moscow, a Canadian teacher stepping onto Soviet soil and remembering Churchill: "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."
Pip: She suspected it was hyperbole. Then she stepped off the plane.
Mara: What holds all of this together is the act of crossing — languages, borders, centuries, the distance between a prophecy and its betrayal.
Pip: Next time, we'll see where that crossing takes us.
…back for a while; his thoughts travel to his good, old friend in Baghdad. Ibrahim has done well with this young man; he has brought him up the right way. It’s no wonder the old man is so proud of Hakim. It’s no wonder that he sees him as a real son; he even calls him his son. He gets the check and goes out to find a taxi to take him to the Sheraton. The rest of this weekend is going to be smooth and pleasant for Bevan Longhorn.He may even sleep in peace tonight since he knows everything is coming together nicely for his exit strategy. His plan is unfolding like clear spring water running slowly down to freshen up the roots of the delicate vegetables and flowers.
Monday has gone by slowly but steadily, as if time learned to go by unnoticed, like a well-tuned machine with gears grasping everyone in between them, stretching and pulling to the point of being ready to snap. Hakim and Jennifer spent their Monday getting ready for their move. She took the day off and did the packing of things one does last; Hakim also stayed home and together they organized the details of the actual move. Today, Talal has come to help them. He’s the one who’ll get the rental truck. Emily is there as well, doing what is necessary to help Jennifer with the kitchen items, since men do not always do things the best way in a woman’s eyes when it comes to the kitchen. Ahmed has gone with Talal to get the truck. “I’ll get the stuff tomorrow,” Ahmed says. “You got it, already?” asks Hakim. “No but it’s ready; it’s just a matter of going for it.” “Alright, now be careful. Who are these guys?” “Leave that to me. Don’t worry about who they are or why they are doing this; leave that to me.” They get the truck and Talal drives it back to Hakim’s apartment. They start putting things in one by one and Jennifer and Emily tell them where to position them in the truck. It takes about an hour and they are ready to go to Emily’s for the rest of the things. Once they finish there, they drive to the new place and move everything upstairs. One elevator has been reserved for them and that makes work a lot easier. By two in the afternoon, they are done; the only thing left to do is to put together the bed and put away the kitchen things, while Talal and Ahmed return the truck to the rental company. When all that is done and Talal comes back with Ahmed, Hakim orders a couple of pizzas and they sit around and enjoy the food. The weather had given them a break with sunny periods throughout the day, and while it’s late in the afternoon, there is still plenty of brightness, and one can see the beauty of the view to the west toward the Pacific Ocean.
Harry leaned forward, simultaneously closing the open drawer in which his Tarzan book was hidden. ‘I will, Mr Anderson,’ he said. ‘Oh, Jefferson’s just called to say the copper piping’s on its way.’ ‘Good. Lock up before you leave, Harry. And don’t forget the keys tomorrow.’ Ian left the office, rushed down the stairs, brushed past a boy with a grey Belfast Telegraph bag of newspapers in the hall and walked quickly round the corner to where his car was parked. Crazy fool, he chastised himself. What a stupid, cock-eyed, half-baked, wild idea. He cursed his cock-eyed, half-baked, wild idea all the way to Lisburn. But he did not stop nor turn around. He swung his car with violence round the endless bends of the narrow road heading south from Lisburn. Stone walls, hedgerows, fields and gloomy woods, small, reedy lakes and low, elongated hills blurred past. Occasionally he turned his head to view a farmhouse that he fancied, then jerked his eyes back to the drunken road, and swung the white-clenched steering wheel in fury, like a ship’s skipper in a storm. Take care, Ian Anderson. You have to get to Carraghlin in one piece. He stopped the car at a crossroads garage to take in a couple of gallons of his precious petrol ration, still in force two years after the end of the war, courtesy of the Minister of Fuel and Power. Then off again with a bound like a horse from an unbolted stable: up the long hill and down again, up and down, up and down, leaping over the rolling, rollicking, rock-littered countryside. Cresting the last hill, the sudden view of the distant Drumard hills struck him like a pie hurled in his face. At Tranaliskeen he saw the sea and the long, white line of a lapping wave. A few minutes later he pulled up outside the Seaview Restaurant in Carraghlin. He stared at the gloomy overhang of high hills, at the hunched shoulders and brooding presence of Slieve Corragh that overshadowed the town like the giant that threatened the village in fairy tales. Ian entered the restaurant, ordered a mixed grill, and unfolded the morning’s Newsletter. Restaurants were exempt from rationing, which inflated resentment against the rich, who could augment their food allowance by eating out frequently and extravagantly. To restrict this resentment, certain rules had been instituted, such as no meal could cost more than five shillings or consist of more than three courses.
Finally the plane broke through the cloud banks, the turbulence vanished and the sight below pushed all thoughts of adolescent students out of Jennifer’s head. She was flying over the birch forests and ragged patchwork fields of the mighty Soviet Union. She gazed eagerly. An image formed easily in her imagination: two young women—her mother and her aunt—thin and desperate, still grieving the loss of their parents, tramping across this very landscape in 1945 following the path of the victorious troop convoys. How far had they walked to the Polish border? It must have been a wearying journey for the two refugees… Suddenly a wedge of apartment blocks appeared on the horizon signalling the suburbs of modern Moscow. The plane circled once, the wing dipping to reveal wide straight highways, clusters of huts amid evergreen trees, and finally, the runways of Moscow’s Sheremetyev Airport. “Hallelujah, we’re really here!” Paul exclaimed. Eve and Dawn giggled. David opened his eyes. A wave of relief flooded the passengers as the plane bumped to a halt. Applause broke out. One stewardess allowed herself a thin-lipped smile while the other busied herself in the galley. The thunderstorm’s humidity hit them the moment the cabin door opened. The summer air was moist and the black clouds still rolled overhead, but for the group from Canada, now shuffling down the steps to the tarmac, no amount of bad weather could destroy this imperial moment. For some, such as Maria, it was a return to the land her parents spoke of, though not always fondly. For others, Jennifer included, it was their first glimpse of a powerful myth. She had never understood Winston Churchill’s quote about Russia—”a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”—and suspected it was hyperbole, but as she stepped from the plane onto Soviet soil, she shivered. Churchill had met Stalin. He should know. What was this country all about? She had first come to know it through the literature of long dead authors, Pushkin and Dostoevsky, considered dissidents in their time. Lately she had come to understand its dark underside through the secret writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, banned in the USSR, published in the west. Yet she had also studied its most glorious moments in the ecstatic language of its revolutionaries. Despite the ordeal of the landing, she felt eager, charged, ready to go everywhere, to see it all.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has built something unusual here — a publishing project that reaches across Greek modernism, Canadian wilderness fiction, and the body's most private reckonings, all without losing the thread.
Mara: vequinox brings all of it together on this site — poetry in translation, prose fiction, landscape verse, and work that sits right at the edge of desire and survival. Let's start with the Greek poets and what exile actually costs.
Greek Poetry And Exile
Pip: The question running through these translations is what happens to a person when society decides they no longer belong — whether that exile is political, psychological, or simply the condition of seeing clearly.
Mara: Tasos Livaditis puts it with terrible precision: "Things have changed; these days, they don't kill. They only point at you with the finger; it is enough. Then, they make a circle that always becomes smaller; they slowly get closer you retreat against the wall, until in desperation you, alone, open a hole to hide in it."
Pip: So the modern machinery of exclusion doesn't need violence — the circle itself is the punishment. Shrinking space does the work that a bullet used to do.
Mara: Yannis Ritsos works the same territory across two volumes here. In the Exile Diaries poem from Volume III, a woman lighting a heater in the cold becomes the whole landscape: "the wind took her place in the room." Volume IV's "Unacceptable" shows a man who discovers some final truth and goes silent — and is convicted unanimously for that silence.
Pip: Silence as a verdict. That's a neat trick the powerful have always loved.
Mara: Antony Fostieris frames it inward — "Behind our eyes, silent and crouched, we look at the world out there like through the skylight of a prison." And Titos Patrikios, in "Movie Theater," finds a strange truce: torturer and tortured sitting together in the dark, briefly unknown to each other, briefly friends.
Pip: Two hours of cinema as the only available ceasefire.
Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's poem watches a worm destroy the September harvest and ends simply: "oh Greece, the next morning I found you changed." Kariotakis and Polydouri give us verses described as blood and heart given away like tears. And the collection "Entropy" reaches for something longer — an eternal Odyssey made of "sails, sphinxes and shipwrecks."
Mara: The review of "Introspection" calls all of this a deliberate strategy: "the inward gaze does not lead to withdrawal or passivity — the inner depths become the place from which the confrontation with the world begins."
Pip: Introspection as a launching pad, not a hiding place. That tension between turning inward and turning outward runs straight into the work on desire.
Desire, Body, And Intimacy
Pip: These pieces ask what the body wants when the world outside it has become unbearable — and whether that wanting is survival or its opposite.
Mara: "HEAR ME OUT" answers that directly. The narrator in the tub watches the water turn pink and thinks: "I was again in the same spot, wrapped in my old warmth. And the foolish people who said, 'It's too late for her, unfortunately…' What 'too late?' For me, everything was just starting."
Pip: A return to the womb framed as a beginning. That is one of the more devastating reversals in any of this material.
Mara: "Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy" places desire in a completely different register — elemental, uncontained, bodies by a river's edge "yearning for erotic apexes." "Orange" is sharper and more compressed: a "brazen thief that leads my mind to an erotic voyage." And "Ugga" strips it to the bone — breast, pen, milk, ink, the acts of suckling and writing placed in the same short breath.
Pip: Eros and language as the same bodily function. Honestly, not the worst theory of poetry.
Mara: "Chthonian Bodies" and "Wellspring of Love" pull toward tenderness and community — people sheltering each other, coffee on the stove, the small negotiations of care. The body here is less a site of crisis and more a place where ordinary life quietly insists on continuing.
Pip: From the tub to the kitchen table — and somehow both feel like resistance. The fictional lives in this work carry the same weight.
Fictional Lives And Moral Reckonings
Pip: The prose fiction here keeps returning to a single question: what do you do with a father, a priest, a painter, a spy — someone whose life demands a reckoning you are not prepared to give?
Mara: "Ken Kirkby: A Painter's Quest for Canada" opens that reckoning in the wilderness. The excerpt describes a night under the northern lights: "It was as if we were laying on the floor of a cathedral the size of the universe. The earth was no longer an issue — we weren't even part of the planet. I can see how religions began."
Pip: A man who locks himself in a studio for seven months to finish a painting after an experience like that — that's not dedication, that's a response to having seen something you can't unfold into ordinary language.
Mara: "He Rode Tall" puts a son back at his estranged father's grave on the prairie and lands on something quieter but just as large: "Joel recognized that your dad is always your dad. No matter what." The bitterness is still there; so is the prayer.
Pip: Grief and grievance occupying exactly the same space. That's the whole novel in one sentence.
Mara: "The Unquiet Land" takes the reckoning into the church. Padraig, a priest whose past the village has never accepted, stands at the sacristy door knowing the congregation at the wedding ahead of him would come "their long knives drawn, their wild teeth gleaming like the fangs of wolves." The community's memory is longer than his redemption.
Pip: A priest haunted by his own congregation. That is a specific and very old kind of loneliness.
Mara: "Small Change" gives us Rick, a boy who out-argues a nun about the nature of sin and voluntary participation, and simply quits. "The Circle" follows a spy arranging his own exit, weighing contingencies over breakfast at the Sheraton. "Fury of the Wind" slows everything down to a saddle, a jar of cream, a kiss on a cheek — Ben's first gift to Sarah, now something she intends to keep.
Pip: A saddle cream on a windowsill as the axis of a relationship. Fiction earns its keep in the small things.
Mara: "Water in the Wilderness" holds the same domestic scale — Tyne waking to sleet, the smell of coffee, a friend who took a leave of absence just to sit nearby. Loyalty measured in presence, not in words.
Pip: All of these characters are navigating what they owe each other — and the landscape outside keeps pressing in on that question.
Nature, Weather, And Landscape
Pip: The natural world in this work is never just backdrop — it watches, it judges, and occasionally it outlasts everyone in the scene.
Mara: "Vespers" makes that explicit: "Ethereal spruce stands guarding our home secrets without her armour having lonely eyes, an assuming smile between arthritic limbs as if to remind me of duties that one performs without being asked, without being paid."
Pip: A tree with arthritic limbs and a sense of duty. Nature as the only reliable volunteer.
Mara: "Mythography" follows a creek answering the river rocks — it is going to the great Ocean, to melt and become "a whiff of air pasted on an autumn day, turning to a wish in the heart of a young lover." And "Wheat Ears" brings the landscape indoors, to a graveside: a dead cousin who seems ready to rise and sit by the sidewalk, and the living person balancing on a tightrope, naked from the waist down, trying to understand what the dead require.
Pip: The creek knows where it's going. The living, considerably less so.
Mara: What holds all of this together is the idea that looking inward and looking outward are the same motion — the exile, the body, the grave on the prairie, the spruce in the yard.
Pip: Poetry as homeland. That phrase from the Introspection review keeps coming back. Next time, we find out what else this site considers home.
There is no such thing as old hat when it comes to this. It’s like it all happens for the first time each time. It grew more and more intense. We lay there on the ground and I don’t know how long we lay there. The shafts of light rippled up in an arc all around us, and they came to a centre point directly above us and that point was a black hole. All the rest was light, and the colours were showering down – purple, gold, green, blue, red. The words don’t work. It was as if we were laying on the floor of a cathedral the size of the universe. The earth was no longer an issue – we weren’t even part of the planet. I can see how religions began. It was stuff like this – it undoes one. All the rational explanations we have for this are nonsense. They just don’t work. You have to find a bigger answer. This is too big, too beautiful, and too mysterious. Something holy descended on their souls. Ken felt as though they had had a direct experience of God and the magic of that night clung to them during those ten days in the Thelon. The Thelon was like no other place on earth. When the glaciers had retreated they had left behind a vast amount of chirt, a very dense stone that had formed into eskers or low humpbacked hills from forty to a hundred and fifty feet high. The stone was so dense the permafrost could not penetrate it and as a result the vegetation that grew there, born from seeds carried by migrating birds, was that of a more southern landscape. But because of the severe winters and punishing winds, it was a landscape in miniature. Trees that might grow to a hundred feet in the south grew to only a couple of feet here, but they were flawlessly formed. At the base of each esker was a perfectly round small lake, so thick with Arctic grayling you could almost reach your hand into the water and pull one out. When they got back Ken promised himself that this time he wouldn’t leave on another trip until he had finished the painting. He locked himself in his studio and from October 1990 to May 1991. He emerged only long enough to eat and sleep. The epic project neared completion. Elaine suggested a decorous and dignified gathering to commemorate the event. Ken and the word “decorous” were obviously never meant to meet. He insisted on a “last brushstroke” party that would be more extravagant than his “first brushstroke” event ten years earlier. Decorum in his studio? A studio that had a sign at the entrance identifying it as “The Zoo?” Karen had even presented him with a road sign he had admired in Yellowknife: Ragged Ass Road and Lois Lane. Ken had actually tried to steal the sign more than once, but each time he had attempted it, someone had gotten to it before him and taken off with it. He guessed that the City of Yellowknife works department likely had a full time employee doing nothing but erecting a new road sign at…
Bevan Longhorn dresses in casual clothes and goes down to the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. It’s Sunday morning and the lobby is filled with people coming and going. Bevan has stayed here before, and this time, although he has only been here for one night, intends to make the best of it. He has arranged his departure for the evening with American Airlines and is to arrive in Washington sometime before midnight, giving him enough time to relax and get to his office Monday morning. On the other hand, if he feels tired the next morning he can always skip work for a day; the agency will survive without him. What presses on his mind today is making sure he can put his hands on what he needs to proceed with his plan of exit, as he calls it. These two young men better have thought of everything; he doesn’t have the time to pussyfoot. However, he has faith in the old man, whom he has always trusted to deliver what is necessary. He walks into the hotel restaurant and orders his breakfast. He opens the morning paper and reads the headlines; the same stuff again and again. His breakfast comes and he tries to enjoy it, despite the headlines and his thoughts. What happens if the two young men cannot get what he needs? A shiver travels down his spine like a thunderbolt as this thought sinks deep in his mind, and he squirms out of fear that all his mental preparation for this last mission might be in vain. He overhears two couples next to him talking about the Oscars scheduled for sometime in March. They seem to be very absorbed in what they are discussing; he hears one of the men supporting one actor over the others, and the other three people seem to agree, as Bevan doesn’t hear any objection to the first person’s remarks. His thoughts take him away again to his plan of action, and he glances at his watch; it is only 10:30 a.m. He’s so anxious about his plan that he cannot wait to meet Hakim at Earl’s and get answers. Ibrahim’s nephew had better have good news for him, or else. What can he do if they cannot get it? He finishes his breakfast, pays his check and goes for a walk around the hotel grounds with the manicured lawns and the pretty shrubs and flowers everywhere. He needs to clear his mind and the crisp morning air will help. He also needs to stretch his legs.
…his training at the seminary, his acceptance by the Church. Obviously His Holiness did not know the full story of this dark man from the mountains of Drumard or wherever it was he came from in the first place. Obviously His Holiness did not know from whom this same man received his education: from pagans and harlots. To have sent back to them this man from the shadow side of time and place, to have ordained him as their own new priest, the old ones regarded as an insult and an outrage. Padraig knew when he returned to the village that few of his flock had accepted him with any willingness and far less with trust. But he had proved himself in only a short time. Now all was lost. Their old suspicions had returned. They remembered. They talked. They retold stories. Some no doubt had seen him shudder or shake or stiffen or stumble and fall. They knew that Satan had come back for him. They knew that his celebration of the Mass was a sacrilege. They were affronted. Their gaze burned like hell-fire. Even the young spurned him; they spat at his passing in the street. When he stood at the altar, holding aloft the Host in celebration of the Eucharist, Padraig could feel their conspiratorial sneaking-forward down the hushed nave of the church, their long knives drawn, their white teeth gleaming like the fangs of wolves, their wild hearts pounding with the urgent wish to kill him. Padraig no longer had his arm in a sling, but the cuts and bruises on his face had not yet completely healed, though the earlier discoloration was fading. He strode across the stone floor of the sacristy and stopped at the door, his hand outstretched but unwilling to lift the wrought-iron latch. His head ached. Satan thumped the insides of his temples, punched the backs of his eyes, drummed loudly in the whorled cavities of his ears. Padraig opened the heavy, dark door, and his arm jerked with pain. He looked out into the church. In less than two hours he must face the hostile crowd that would come to the wedding of Caitlin MacLir and Michael Carrick. The church was empty yet, except for two young altar boys who were talking earnestly in the front pew. “Stephen,” Padraig called, steadying himself against the door post. “Stephen, come here a minute.” His voice boomed like explosions in his head. One of the altar boys, one of Joe Carney’s sons, came forward, unsurely as the young Samuel. “Yes, Father?” “Stephen, do you have your bicycle outside?” “I do, Father.” The surprise that showed in Stephen’s eyes was a response either to the unexpected question or to the look of black-eyed distraction in the drawn face of the priest.
She’s not a bad person. The kids from church call her fast, whatever that means, but she’s not what they make it sound like.” “If you say so. Anyway, you were at her graduation ceremony yesterday. Isn’t that enough?” “It’s not the same thing, Ronnie, and you know it. The party tonight is at her place and it’s just for special friends.” “Well, you’d just better forget it.” Ronnie picked up his mug and got to his feet. “I’ve got to get to work. Morley’ll be ready to start the cutting. And listen, Rachael, give your mom a break and don’t make things harder for her. She has enough to worry about with Aunt Millie being sick.” Rachael’s look changed from one of self-pity to a worried frown. She stood up. “Ronnie, do you think … that is … is Aunt Millie going to make it?” A cloud passed over his face. “I hope so, I really hope so. But only God knows that, and all we can do is pray for her.” He put his mug in the sink, retrieved his cap and went out. Rachael stood for a minute longer staring at the closed door, then she went to the phone to call Lyssa. ͣMorley and Ronald were sitting at the kitchen table when Tyne walked in a little before nine o’clock that evening. Both men turned quickly to look at her. The aroma of coffee drew her eyes to the stove where a pot hissed and bubbled an invitation. Responding to their greeting, she bent to kiss Morley’s cheek. Sensing his intention as he started to rise, she murmured, “Don’t get up, honey. I’ll help myself to the coffee.” “But you look worn out, Sweetheart.” “And you have been working all day in the fields.” She filled a mug with coffee and sat down at the table. Both men spoke at once. “How’s Aunt Millie?”
Manolis Aligizakis 