Himself

by Jess Kidd

For the dead are always close by in a life like Mahony’s. The dead are drawn to the confused and the unwritten, the damaged and the fractured, to those with big cracks and gaps in their tales, which the dead just yearn to fill. For the dead have secondhand stories to share with you, if you’d only let them get a foot in the door.

But then Tadhg knew that a decent woman would be slower to court: the higher the mind the trickier the knickers.

It is the smell of a million mold-blossomed pages, of a thousand decaying bindings, of a universe of dead words.

Mahony is sleeping. Come closer. Close enough to inhale tobacco and sweat, road dust and whiskey, sunlight and hair oil. Close enough to follow the swell of his shoulder all the way down to his inked and rounded bicep where a big-breasted mermaid swims. She blows you a kiss and fans her tail. Come closer. Close enough to plot the lines on his forehead, the fine slope of his nose and the long-lashed crescents of his closed eyes. Now, hold your breath for this, slowly trace the teasing curve of his lips, open a little in sleep. Look around you. The dead are watching too.

Be still. The dead are drawing in. They wring their hands apologetically. They wait for his eyes to open so that they can be seen. They only want to be seen.

Words are capable of flying. They dart through windows, over fences, between bar stools, and across courtyards. They travel rapidly from mouth to ear, from ear to mouth. And as they go, they pick up speed and weight and substance and gravity. Until they land with a scud, take seed, and grow as fast as the unruliest of beanstalks.

It is a truth universally unacknowledged that when the dead are trying to remember something, the living are trying harder to forget it.

Of course, ask Bridget Doosey and she would tell you that milk products are particularly vulnerable to malevolent supernatural forces. Keep the dead away from the dairy, she’d advise.

For a while still the sun will pour warm honey on her wheelchair. It will pool on the table before her, glancing the rim of her whiskey glass

Now the air tastes of bonfires and dark days, now the land is forgetting warm winds and soft days and remembering bitter skies and keen dawns.

“Can you blame him for becoming restless? You’ve said yourself that a fatherless man is always searching.”