Ghost Wall

by Sarah Moss

Give us a hand, Sil, she said, he says if you do it right you can cover it for the night and pull the turfs off in the morning, he says that’s how they always did it, them. In the old days. Yeah, I said, kneeling beside her, and I suppose he didn’t say as how there was someone to show you, in the old days, how they didn’t just give out instructions and bugger off.

I did not know what my father thought I might want to do, but he devoted considerable attention to making sure I couldn’t do it.

I picked up a blade and a rabbit. It was only the heat of the day, of course, that made the rabbit still warm, that gave the impression that I was hacking at the paws of a living being. It was not flinching, only springing back as I cut through nerves, scraped on bone. The eyes were beginning to dull.

Her hands had been bound for two thousand years.

Without a house, it occurred to me, it is much harder to restrict a person’s movement. Harder for a man to restrain a woman.

The whole of life, I thought, is doing harm, we live by killing, as if there were any being of which that is not the case.

Haven’t you been listening, people don’t bother to hurt what they don’t love. To sacrifice it.