What the Wind Knows

by Amy Harmon

And though love is indeed a terrible beauty, especially given the circumstances, I can only revel in all its gory gloriousness.

The Ireland in our story slept under the tricolor flag,

But peace would come. It would come in layers, in pieces, in chapters, just like in a story. And Ireland—the Ireland of the green hills and abundant stone, of the rocky history and the turbulent emotions—would endure.

The rest of the Mass—the prayers, the communion, the blessings, and the recessional—occurred distantly, separate from the two of us, as though we’d slipped into a realm of muted sounds and subtleties where only we existed, and time was liquid all around us.

The light of the lamp touches her freely, boldly even, brushing her hair and tracing the dip of her waist and the swell of her hip, and I am irrationally jealous of the caress.

I know the novelty will wear off, and life will intrude before long. But it is not the newness of her, the newness of us, that has captured me. It is the opposite. It is as if we always were and always will be, as though our love and our lives sprang from the same source and will return to that source in the end, intertwined and indistinguishable. We are ancient. Prehistoric and predestined.

his face was blank, as though he’d suffered so long with the sharp edge of guilt it had carved him into an empty shell.

I willed the mist to roll in, but the August sun did not cooperate. The beautiful days played dumb, and the wind and the water were silent, pretending innocence, and no matter how much I recited and raged, the lough denied me.