The Sea Remembers

Siobhan Malone wakes before her alarm on a Wednesday in January with a sound under the house trying to become a song. She closes the lid on it and goes to the lake anyway. She is a secondary school teacher in Westmeath, a cold-water swimmer, a woman who has learned to name only the griefs large enough to justify complaint. The small ones she keeps. The lake gives her twenty minutes a week when none of it matters. This morning, Lough Derravaragh stops mid-ripple. The sound comes back through the water. Through her teeth. Through the bones of her wrists. Four white shapes move in the dark below the surface - not swans - and a girl's voice, raw with centuries, asks a question the lake has been carrying since before the first saint came to Ireland. Were you listening? The Children of Lir were cursed to the water for nine hundred years. They received their burial. The rite was true and the ground was right. But the grief went into the lake before they died. And grief that has no grave eventually finds its own way home.