Looking Glass Sound

by Catriona Ward

This is the first time I hear it, the whistling for which the bay is named. It sounds like all the things you’re not supposed to believe in – mermaids, selkies, sirens.

There’s a look in her eye like she knows, somewhere deep down, that her time will be cut short. It’s strangely common, I have found, with photographs of the dead. It’s there in their faces – what’s to come. But of course that can’t be true. It’s us who are left behind who see it. Who put it there.

That day I had an episode in my class on Faulkner. It was, as it turns out, me who lay dying.