The Shortest Day

by Colm Tóibín

We do not connect with mortals, in the same way as eternity does not wish to connect with time. Mortals have concerns we do not have. They are like water if we are fire.

“And what is Stonehenge?” Fios asked. “It is an island in the sea off Dublin inhabited by goats.”

And yet he remembered one night in the pub nearest to Newgrange when a local man, who lived now in America, told him that the burial chamber was precisely positioned to capture light, but only on one day of the year. The man spoke as though he was revealing something precious and valuable.

When any future strife arose, those in the dispute could follow the twisting trail cut into the stone with their eyes and come to see that all disagreements, like all versions of time, circled each other, uncertain which was the line and which was the space through which the line was etched.

But she was always aware that she lived in a place that was inhabited by the dead as much as by the living, the dead who had crossed the line many centuries before, people long forgotten.

They had sought to work with that strangeness so that death, when it came, would be less alien to them.

We must seem a small thing to them who have lived so long and known so much. I don’t know why, but I believe that no harm will come from what has happened.