The Girl from Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

His breath carried an odor of halibut and sorrow.

“But there are some who choose to listen to the song of mortality, which underlies it, lies beneath everything—the long note beneath the cacophony. For those who can hear death, whistling always, underneath, who do not fear him, but see his part in the music”—he grasped my arm as if in sympathy—“for them, it is a vocation of the loneliest, and the highest order.”

His hands unfold; they make a flower in the small of my back. His breath fills my head like the ocean. We’re alive. The sky’s larger than it has ever been.

(men in idle moments, I find, will always seek a stick and something to hit),

It is with trepidation and grave conscience that the faithful man considers a roadside grave. The soul of a suicide is an abomination rightly excluded from the consecration of the churchyard.

You can only begin to believe in death when it cuts you where you love.