Foster

by Claire Keegan

am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.

Why did he leave without so much as a good-bye, without ever mentioning that he would come back for me? The strange, ripe breeze that’s crossing the yard feels cooler now, and big white clouds have marched in across the barn.

‘Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame – and shame is something we can do without.’

drink six measures of water and wish, for now, that this place without shame or secrets could be my home.

They will have thrown their clay buns against the gable wall of the outhouse, and when the rain comes, the clay will soften and turn to mud. Everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.

Walking down the road, there’s a taste of something darker in the air, of something that might fall and blow and change things.

Kinsella takes my hand in his. As soon as he takes it, I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won’t have to feel this. It’s a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be.

‘Do you know what the women have a gift for?’ ‘What?’ ‘Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before a man even gets a sniff of it.’

And that is when he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his own.

wake earlier than usual and look out at the wet fields, the dripping trees, the hills – which seem greener than they did when I came.

Then I bend down with the bucket, letting it float then swallow and sink as the woman does – but when I reach out with my other hand, to lift it, another hand just like mine seems to come out of the water and pulls me in.

They seem different, thinner, and have nothing to say.