Caitríona O'Reilly

The secretive hart turns at bay, lowers his tines to the hounds’ cry. The sword enters the bull’s heart— still he stands, amazed on the red sand as the stony unbeliever might, who has seen God. Soon now horns will sound dedow for the unmaking. Beaters flush the grey heron like a coney from its warren, the peregrine’s jet eyes flash. They go ringing up the air, each in its separate spiral stair to the indigo rim of the skies, then descend swift as a murderer’s hand with a knife. Death’s gesture liquefies in bringing the priestly heron down. Her prize, the marrow from a wing-bone in which she delights, her spurred fleur-de-lys tongue stained gold-vermilion— little angel in her hangman’s hood.

Between the imaginary iceberg and the skeletal whale is the stuffed and mounted mermaid in her case, the crudely-stitched seam between skin and scale so unlike Herbert Draper’s siren dreams, loose on the swelling tide, part virgin and part harpy. Her post-mortem hair and her terrible face look more like P.T. Barnum’s Freak of Feejee, piscene and wordless, trapped in the net of a stare. She has the head and shrivelled tits of a monkey, the green glass eyes of a porcelain doll, a pair of praying-mantis hands, and fishy lips open to reveal her sea-caved mouth, her rare ivory mermaid-teeth. Children breathe and rap on the glass to make her move. In her fixity she’s as far as can be from the selkie who slips her wet pelt on the beaches of Orkney and walks as a woman, pupils widened in light, discarding the stuffed sack of her body. Without hearing, or touch, or taste, or smell, or sight she echoes the numb roll of the whale in a sea congealed with cold, when it was thought no beast could be a nerveless as the whale.

They’d barely emerged from the deep-green forests of that epauletted century. Geraniums bloomed on windowsills in Heidelberg. Student princes eyed the tavern keeper’s daughter through the blond foam of their tankards. The future must have seemed weightless as it came nosing through the clouds, smooth as a biblical fish throwing its giant shadow on the sea floor, its thin gold-beater’s skin pressed back against its ribs, cloche-hatted women in fox furs waving through its observation windows. Composed of too much dream stuff to be echt matériel, shoals of them congregated silently over London in the moon’s dark phases, concealed above clouds. Their crews were unnerved by crackling blue halos; eerie lightning shot from frostbitten fingers as they lowered spy baskets on trapeze wires below the cloud cover, taking careful soundings, then dropped their antique payloads on the gaping population. Those whom they did not kill scarcely believed in them, improbable contraptions the parchment-yellow color of old maps, vessels a rational traveler might have chosen, a half-century earlier, to pursue daft, round-the-world steampunk wagers. But for them — the gilded aerialists in their giant dirigibles — the world remained a storybook unfolding endlessly in signs and wonders, over which they drifted in stylish accidie; leviathan hunters, relaxed as Victorian naturalists. And up there everything looked different: the borders absurd, the people in their witch-fearing villages as 
out-of-date as peasants in a medieval breviary. The mountains, too, seemed surpassable, offering an alternative angle on the sublime. Occasionally there was concern: a tear in the fabric, hooked to a typhoon’s tail above the China Sea, or harried by storms across the Atlantic. But how lighter than air they were. They did not understand, as they fell continually upwards, how the nature of the element was the price of their rising: the assiduous atom seeking an exit, thronging the fabric of their cells. Witness was the privilege of the many: newsreels captured the death of a star and — oh the humanity! — its last leisurely plummet in fire, its ashen armature.