Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

She awoke to find her fishtail clean gone but in the bed with her were two long, cold thingammies. You'd have thought they were tangles of kelp or collops of ham. "They're no doubt taking the piss, it being New Year's Eve. Half the staff legless with drink and the other half playing pranks. Still, this is taking it a bit far." And with that she hurled the two thingammies out of the room. But here's the thing she still doesn't get— why she tumbled out after them arse-over-tip... How she was connected to those two thingammies and how they were connected to her. It was the sister who gave her the wink and let her know what was what. "You have one leg attached to you there and another one underneath that. One leg, two legs... A-one and a-two... Now you have to learn what they can do." In the long months that followed, I wonder if her heart fell the way her arches fell, her instep arches.

A martyr this morning, as ever, to cramps and pains I organize myself to face the day. I show a leg, put my shoulder to the wheel, Daub paint on my eyelids and stick a couple of long Hairpins in my desperate mane to hold it— Too much trouble even to brush my hair. I start on the spot on this heavy, sluggish, Difficult, heartbreaking work, the reason no doubt I was first put on the earth. I take the same little plastic brush that I use On good days to spread melted butter on pastry. And gradually lay bare with insect patience, Sifting away like an ant, with a hunter’s eye, or The sharp ear of a trespassing pig, alternately huffing And puffing and effing and blinding: in the wet sand, The painful lines of our horror, the boundaried frame of fear, That lays us low so often in the bogs of despond. You’d take it as first for a boat’s skeleton, a kind Of Sutton Hoo for our people, but soon its true shape appears: Biblical Behemoth, the monster of all the old tales.