Eggshells by Caitriona Lally

Author:Caitriona Lally
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2017-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

14

THE SKY IS dark with a lump of rain in it; this is good. There will be fewer people in today’s thin places. I’m going to visit the National Botanic Gardens and Glasnevin Cemetery, but “cemetery” sounds too clean and functional—I prefer the vague foggy sound of “graveyard.” I make a flask of coffee and let myself quietly out of the house. I walk through Phibsborough, following the curve of the road around to Glasnevin. When the watchtower looms into view, I look for Rapunzel at its window, a mummified Rapunzel with snakes for hair and rats for eyes, but not even a tormented squint conjures her into being. I pass a woman selling flowers at the entrance to the cemetery. The flowers look so perfect, packed together in their buckets. I consider getting some, but taking just one bunch would be like trying to separate puppy brothers, and buying flowers from a graveyard for personal use could put the hex of death on me. I walk to the old part of the cemetery and look at the headstones. Every dead person is “Dearly Beloved” or “Sadly Missed,” but that can’t be true for all of them; death brings out the worst of lies. I weave through the headstones, imagining what kinds of lives these people really had. Maybe Edward Neary beat his wife and Mrs. Neary doesn’t sadly miss the beatings. Mrs. Honor Cole might have been dearly beloved not only by her husband, but by a stream of other men too. One tombstone holds an upper-case bellow of a prayer: “MERCY JESUS MERCY.” I’d like to know what badness this man did, or thought he did, in his lifetime. I pass the grave of Alphonse Hazard, who, with a name like that, had to have been a stunt double in Hollywood. I write his name in my notebook, along with any other names from tombstones that look like they could form a pattern. Several of the larger graves have iron cages around them; I don’t know if this is to keep the dead in or the living out. Some of the tombstones on a grassy slope are cracked or knocked flat, the aftermath of a violent fight among the dead. Near them, a huddle of tombstones slants backwards and forward, like a chatter of people leaning back in their chairs saying, “Wait till you hear, c’mere till I tell you.”

I walk up the slope towards the fresher graves. The flowers lining the path droop as if they were looking for their dead friends under the soil. The only sounds are the distant vrum of traffic and the rustle of trees in the wind and a bird with a chirp like the creak of a swing. I come upon a muted fuss some ways off the path: a new body is moving in. I sneak up slowly and hide behind a tree. An elderly woman stands at the open-mouthed grave, flanked by two younger women. The priest calls out a drone of words, and the women look at the coffin and cry.

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