Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

“Don’t apologize too much, kid. It’ll bleed you dry.” “What if you’ve a lot to apologize for?” “Once is enough for anything.” I suppose that’s true. It’s impossible to control someone else’s capacity for forgiveness.

I learned this love of darkness not from my husband, though I learned so much from him, but in our bottom paddock in the deep, witching hour of the morning, with true night draped above in a sky full of stars and a sea roaring gently in the distance and my silent grandma beside. All those nights we spent down there in that pitch-black paddock, and never a word between us, only an occasional sigh from me because I’d rather have been in bed.