Read Away for Free Online Page A

introduce the topic of philosophy.
    O’Malley set the kettle to boil.
    “What was the name of that ship?” the priest asked for want of something better to say.
    “Moira,” said O’Malley. “The
Moira
was her name. She came out of Belfast, I believe.”
    The priest registered the name but did not comment upon it. “And where was she bound?”
    “For America, I think they said, a place called Halifax.”
    “She hadn’t gone that far on her journey, then.”
    “No,” agreed the schoolmaster, “she hadn’t gone far at all.”

 
    S HE awoke at first light, swimming upwards from deep, green dreams.
    The desire for the sea was on her. Liquid.
    This was the only room she had ever known. From that small window she had watched her father’s departing sail, her small hand flat against the cool glass.
    Now the room was bathed in blues and greens; the furniture dim as if holding onto night.
    In her dreams her father’s sail collapsed into a green horizon. Gone.
    His wake had tumbled around and eventually out of her memory. Coffinless. The singers and the smokers. Herself near her mother’s skirts and all the women wailing.
    She had waited for him to return for three years until even his absence became absent.
    Now she lay in the dawn with the desire on her and armies of new words in her mind requesting that she say them.
    “His forehead,” she whispered, the words pushing out past her lips, “his long arm.”
    She lay flat on her back with her hands open on her stomach, the idea of his arm as real as if it glistened there before her.
    “Just below the surface,” she began, “with the tatters of your shirt around it and the fluid between us, the flower of your handturning in the ocean’s mind, your arm a bright banner, your forehead an approaching sail. My own arms pushing wind aside to plunge them into salt. Let me breathe this green with you and be with you. Our breastbones touching.”
    Her bed was hard and dry. Sheets rasped, papery, against her skin and blankets were heavy on her limbs. Anything solid was an impediment when there was this sea change upon her. Her body, it seemed, was composed of salt fluids: blood and tears.
    She left the cabin quietly, timing each footfall to coincide with her mother’s snores and settling the doorlatch back into place soundlessly. Soon her bare feet were covered with dew and the bottom of her skirt drenched in it. Her mind already awash with love, her eyes fixed on the black beach over which she had to walk in order to swim. Dark morning birds lifted away from the earth she walked on, her words spinning in the sky then flying over the fields to the shore.
    She would swim until cold and exertion caused her body to ache and her mouth to gasp. Then she would swim harder and he would begin to take shape. She would see his ribs in the sand ripples and something in the surf would begin to speak to her. “Moira, Moira,” until all of him, a taut muscle, glided by her side. Salt-lipped, slick-thighed. And afterwards they would stagger to the black beach where she put her head on his still chest.
    There was great wealth in this, great treasure. She had him, even when far from the sea in all the new words that sang and spoke in her mind and spilled from her lips. And then the pictures he had shown her: distant harbours, far shores, rivers penetrating foreign continents, a glimpse of a strange dome or monument, a riot of flowers the colour of flame dancing on a weird strand, mountains flickering on a horizon. He would open his hands under the water and there would be steeples, towers, forests, a crowded wharf.
    She could build him with stones and smooth driftwood, with salt water and sand, the architecture of his body fragile and impermanent, the sea reclaiming it when she turned again towards the world. But the next time she needed him the materials would come into her hands as she swam and she would know the pleasure, the craft of reconstruction.
    This morning, as always when