by Michelle Walshe
The mist tumbles down the mountain, an avalanche of air, engulfing every potato plot, sprig of heather and dwelling in its path. One by one, the glimmers of candlelight in the stone houses extinguish, the animals stop grazing and raise their heads. The birds fall silent.
The last time the mist came, the potato crop failed. The time before that, a giant fish, bigger than any child in the village, washed up on Keel beach. And the time before that, three villagers died in mysterious circumstances, one, a newborn baby. All the bodies were found near the sea.
Whispers of a curse travelled through the village; some said the mist was a restless ghost searching for something or someone. Others dismissed such foolish talk and said the mist was nothing more than a few clouds that had lost their way.
The fiddle player lives in the house at the end of the village. He plays all day, every day, plucking at the strings, creating a new tune or perfecting an old one. The skin on his fingertips is red and puckered. Music floats from his one-room cottage, through the thatch roof or the stone walls, or out the front door, upwards to those working on the higher slopes of the mountain, digging the trenches for the potatoes. The village children call it the house that sings. The stones vibrate with sound.
The children gather at the door of the fiddle player every day when they’ve finished collecting seaweed and crushing seashells that fertilize the potato beds. They gather around the turf fire smouldering in the grate and sing and clap along to the music.
Sometimes, if the day is fine, he leads them through the village, playing his fiddle, his eyes focused on his fingers plucking the strings. The children follow in a ragged line, singing, skipping, tripping over quartz embedded in the muddy path like crystallized puffs of cloud. Those not paying attention to where they are walking fall into puddles and scrape their hands and knees, but they bounce back up quickly not wanting to be left behind for the fiddle player neither looks back nor looks up.
The potato farmers high atop the hillside stop their work and lean on their shovels to watch the musical parade snaking around the houses. They smile at each other and at the vista before them. The one man in the village who knows nothing about potato farming or fishing, or cows or sheep brings joy to the inhabitants, helps them to forget their hunger and grief, especially the children who sing as they gather food or fuel and the sound echoes down the mountainside. Sometimes the sheep lift their heads to stare. Sometimes not.
It is cold and dark on the day the mist descends. It reaches the house of the fiddle player last. All the village children are gathered there. Light pools beneath the windows, forming yellow rectangles on the stony ground. Music, chatter and laughter jostle with each other inside the walls.
The mist wraps itself around the cottage, like a spider spinning a web, until there is no longer any light visible on the ground and the sounds from inside become muted. The smell of turf disappears.
In the morning, when the villagers wake, water surrounds the cottage like a moat as if the mist had dissolved and settled on the ground. The women, arms outstretched, cry for their children. Some are already wailing.
The men scramble across the moat. It appears shallow. The stones are still visible under the surface. The familiar white quartz glints. One by one, as they cross, calling out their children’s names, they are pulled under. There’s no sound or struggle.
The women fall silent.
A mist forms at the top of the mountain as they huddle together. It falls forward, a white sheet of grief.
A sound as shrill and as high as a cry of a seabird rises from the women as they back away from the cottage, from their village and their homes.
Michelle Walshe is from Dublin, Ireland. Her writing has received funding from the Arts Council of Ireland and other national and local arts bodies. Her short fiction has been published in literary journals, newspapers and magazines, been awarded prizes and been broadcast on RTE Radio One. She has a website for her writing www.thesparklyshell.com.
Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash
