Walk the Blue Fields: Stories

by Claire Keegan

There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.

Weddings are hard. The drink flows and the words come out and he has to be there. A man loses his daughter to a younger man. A woman sees her son throwing himself away on a lesser woman. It is something they half believe. There’s the expense, the sentiment, the no going back. Any time promises are made in public, people cry.

A single cloud floats on the sky, so pale and out of place, like a cloud left over from another day.

‘Yes,’ says the Chinaman. ‘You trouble.’ ‘My trouble?’ The Chinaman nods. ‘I have no trouble,’ the priest says. The Chinaman laughs; he understands this is what people who are in trouble say.

The silence is like every silence; each man is glad of it and glad, too, that it won’t last.

With bills, school uniforms and a wife’s unspoken desire to leave, another year begins.

So much of her life has revolved around things that never happened.

Ponies stood with their backsides to the wind as though the wind would fertilise them.