Fermanagh Cave

An emerald dungeon’s blacklight glow glimmered in the deeper reaches where my son and I could hear the slub of water riddling through the muck. We’d stumbled on it following a stream, his first cave made stranger still by a chill that closes on the goblined heart of a boy inflamed by stories where gnome-clans hoarded underground bone-shard, mandrake, monkey gland, and eel. And so, grave Hansel paying out his last scraps of bread, he inched inward looking back and gathering himself as he devolved step by step along the wet-ribbed walls, the omphalos seepage of a subterranea that dreamed us into its kingdom come, where like some secret dreams make known the burnt-punk smell of marijuana cluttered up the air, and just beyond, just close enough to see, a spur of light that like a dwindling eyemote disappeared. Then the sound a human soul makes as it slips out from the throat. Composed in darkness, my son’s hand closed on mine. I bent to whisper we could turn back now, but his voice was there before me saying, “Something’s here.” And something was, something that in that instant rose, and moved off from us, or drew up close. In either case, my son came to me almost weightlessly at first, then hungry for what was filling up my arms, the startled, upriding bodyweight of a boy I’d never before felt rock so solidly into the place I was, blind and hunkered in the earthen air. I held him only a moment there. We didn’t speak. And though the wheeze of his breathing must’ve stopped my ears, for weeks to come, settling him back to sleep at night, or waking him from some troubling dream, I’d hear the soft concussion of an outsized heart- beat I could not decide was mine, or his, or the stranger’s I had brought us to. Or if what happened would happen again, years from now, when he is grown, and I have grown newly strange to him.