John McCluskey
An except from A Moment of Fireflies
When Michael reached the corner, he saw a funeral procession approach, heading toward the church. Michael stopped at the corner and tried to light a cigarette. A gust of wind blew out the flame. The sun burst out watering his tired eyes. He lit another match successfully and took a long pull, closing his eyes briefly in response to the throbbing in his head. He stayed on the corner and watched the cars slowly turn and head toward the church. He studied each car for its passengers: adults with solemn faces and a few children who did not look like they understood how they were supposed to feel, trying to look genuinely sad though the sorrow appeared to be at the thinnest level afforded that of a distant relative. The line of six cars stopped in front of the church where a group had already gathered – a small but respectable funeral – and Michael saw six men approach the funeral coach and slide the casket out.
The simple wooden casket was carried up the steps, and a small but sufficient gathering stood in bundled up reverence around it before it disappeared into the church. Michael stood at the corner a bit longer and continued studying the scene. He had focused on the group intently as it gathered around the casket before entering the church. He imagined there were close friends and aunts and uncles. Some of the men stood together and smoked; the women crossed themselves as the casket passed; a few children wandered up the steps looking for something else to do while the grownups occupied themselves with the solemn duty of respect for the dead. He wondered if it was a man or a woman in the casket, what their life was like, and who the closest ones left behind were.
As he studied the group, and the sun washed the street and continued to water his eyes, he fixed his stare on a young thin woman and a boy. He instantly knew the person in the casket was a man, and a husband and father at that. The thin woman’s head was bowed, her face was covered, and her hand was on a young boy’s shoulder ... a boy about the age of nine or ten years old. The boy did not join the other children but stood close by his mother, preferring to feel the familiar weight of her hand extending its protection against a confusing tragedy well underway. Michael felt instantly small and hopelessly out of place, even on the far perimeter of the woman’s presence. He thought of Lily, and he struggled briefly to steady himself, and he looked away, as if trying to avoid some quiet recognition of something better left unsaid. He threw his cigarette butt down on the sidewalk, stepped on it, and immediately lit another. His nose began to run from the cold; he sniffed and swallowed uncomfortably. The sidewalk in front of the church had cleared but for a few stragglers, and Michael turned toward the church and headed for the funeral.
Michael approached the stairs of the church. Two men stood outside. One of the men glanced over at Michael but said nothing. Michael pulled up his coat collar to avoid further attention, and he quietly and unassumingly entered the church.
The group had spread out across the front three pews on either side of the center aisle. Michael found a seat off to one side towards the back where he would not be noticed. Safely and respectfully removed from the others, he sat down with a clear view of the mother and son, though he was not sure why he came into the church, or what he hoped to gain in the presence of grief-stricken strangers. The casket lay at the front of the center aisle. The sun, illuminating the stained-glass windows and creating rectangles of light on the floor, did not touch the casket, or the woman, or the boy. The priest appeared and made the sign of the cross.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
(In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.)
Michael focused on the ritual of the mass: standing and sitting on cue, kneeling on cue, every movement robotic. His disassociation from the emotional impact and the people involved gave him immediate peace, however thin. He didn’t hear the sounds of tears, the occasional child’s voice, the loud echo of a kneeler dropped suddenly to the tile floor, or the responses to the priest, as the sunlight gradually found the casket, traveling its length slowly and in concert with the mass. Perhaps this was the reason he came: to see a stranger succumb to a devastating power over him, as if another’s young pain would justify his own. But an immediate abhorrence of himself for taking any refuge at all in the suffering of another – especially a young child – reclaimed him. He craved a cigarette and a drink, feeling the familiarity of self-loathing, and he began to panic knowing neither was available.
Introibo ad altere Dei.
(I will go unto the altar of God)
Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.
(To God who giveth joy to my youth.)
Michael looked at the casket, as the priest spoke, and then at the young boy. He could see the side of the young boy’s face clearly enough from his distant seat; he studied it thoroughly. His dark, wet hair was neat and matted down, except for a determined cowlick, the crooked hairline revealing a hasty job performed out of necessity. His ample ears grew ahead of the rest of his features, a small scrape defaced his supple cheek, and the collective sorrow revealed in these particulars caused Michael to think of David and see him in the same way he saw the boy at the head of the church. He took in deeply his son’s very being, knowing this image was gone at the very moment he was savoring its innocence. David should not have to be any older than he is right now, but he rides the streetcars and pays the bills, with scabs on his knees and overly large, crooked teeth, which time will address. The loss to come of his son’s young days always felt so permanent to Michael, long before it happened and especially now. He couldn’t process this sense of permanence, and the boy in the church, his own beloved son, that house in Ireland, and his need for drink so focused Michael on the quiet march of time in the impossible state of the present that he uttered an unexpected sound at the intrusive thought. He knew others in the church must have heard it; he felt his cheeks flush in embarrassment, and he turned away, looking in every direction, as if an explanation for all abrupt extractions from innocence could be found in the sublime shades of light and darkness resident in the church.
Requiem aeternam dona eis,
Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis.
(Eternal rest grant unto them,
O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them.)
The congregation stood, and the shifting posture of grief pulled Michael out of his fixation but not out of his disquietude. He thirsted so and began to sweat a little despite the cold and drafty church. He glanced again at the young boy, and the scar on his cheek reminded him of his son’s swollen lip, and he hung his head in shame.
He didn’t know what time he had arrived home last night.
Kyrie eleison
(Lord have mercy)
He didn’t know how he broke the table, but he knew he did.
Christe eleison
(Christ have mercy)
And he knew he had somehow hurt his son.
Kyrie eleison
(Lord have mercy)
The damage done to him as a boy was reaching his son, through him, and Michael was shaken by this realization while also betrayed by the lack of magnificence and absolution thought to inhabit the tender beginnings of truth, no matter how rough.
The sunlight on the casket shimmered briefly off its handles. “I don’t know what to do.” The thought grabbed Michael directly; its sheer simplicity chilled him. He shivered for a moment, and his eyes began to fill, but he felt angry at the physical reaction to a brave admission of the tumult occurring within him.
His son. How could he have hurt him so, he had to stop. He hoped no one would turn to look at him and discover such a detestable stranger at the funeral. How he detested himself!
Requiem aeternam dona eis,
Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis.
(Eternal rest grant unto them,
O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them)
He looked at the casket and thought how much better off his family would be if he were the one in permanent repose inside that box. Oh, the dead! His thoughts turned to his dead father, and his mother in a sad and ready state, her soft soul forever sinking at the loss of its mate. He thought of his two brothers born to die in a great influenza outbreak with so many others. He thought of everyone he knew who had died, and those he didn’t know, and he wondered where they all were now, millions and millions of the dead, who had come and gone over time, long forgotten, most of whom the living couldn’t possibly know ever existed. How many had died unhappy, hurt, betrayed? Were they all forgiven; would he be as well? Oh, the impact upon a boy’s spirit when broken by the early removal of a father, or love, or dignity. Oh, Ireland, and the abortive self! Michael grabbed the back of the pew in front of him with both hands despite a shooting pain reminding him yet again of last night. He detected a faint scent of carnations, theirs the delicate and ancient fragrance of death he had come to know kneeling at the flowered caskets of so many dead relatives. He then thought he heard a distressing wail of despair and the collapse of someone consumed by grief at burial. He grew frightened by the overwhelming thoughts and imagined sensory experiences, and he sat down slowly.
The priest spoke in preparation of administering Holy Communion. Michael remained seated and did not take communion at the mass of the dead. He looked up instead, to watch the people stand and move in line toward the casket and the chalice in order to give his mind ease, and occupy it with the motion of others. Then he saw the boy in the front pew looking towards the back of the church, as if he too might be searching for answers. The two strangers locked eyes for the briefest moment before turning away. Michael dropped to his knees. “If only I could pray.” He had tried in church earlier that morning, but he did not feel he was worthy of being heard. He was desperate to try again, thinking the ear of God to be most available when most invisible, but he could not properly prepare his mind, as if prayer was an act he could control. He couldn’t stop thinking about last night, his son’s age, and how he hated himself at ten years old, and it made him thirst even more and crave yet another cigarette. His heart began to beat faster, and he felt clammy and short of breath, as the sun lit the foot of the casket and was soon to die on the floor, though Michael missed the passage of light.
The sight of a ten-year-old boy ... my son ... reminds me of being ten years old in Ireland, Michael admitted to himself, every time I see him.
He took a deep breath to steady himself, but the perfumed air in the wintertime church turned his stomach, as the priest incensed the coffin. “Why did I go inside that house?”
Requiem aeternam dona eis,
Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis.
(Eternal rest grant unto them,
O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them)
The prayer Michael needed to find came at last. He remained on his knees but did not close his eyes; he did not bow his head; he did not pick up a prayer book; he did not make the sign of the cross, or ask for forgiveness; he did not pray the Our Father, the Hail Mary, or the Act of Contrition; he did not look at the boy in the front of the church, though he hoped that the boy would return to loving his father after his anger at being abandoned had become small enough. He asked only that he remember it exactly as it happened. And he did.
How long the dusty road through the meadows and the gentle slope of hills and the small loose flock of sheep aimlessly grazing on the uplift of land and the low rock walls snaking across the springtime land of brown and green, a tumble of boulder here and there, fallen from the wall, and the walls would lose their shape eventually, the fine work of the farmer’s hand no longer admired, and the last of the rocks would lie scattered and forever out of place and the late afternoon sun behind him now with clouds to smear the orange and pink of the coming evening, in the evening hours, when boys were home to finish the day’s work on the land with their fathers.
How dusty the long road home, so late, and the rocks beneath his feet, so tender and young. He should be home, the tender skin to bloom in its own time. So alone down the road with the sky and the sun to drop behind a cloud for but a moment and scatter the beckoning arms of light across the grand and forever forgiving sky high above the brown whorl of hair on the crown of the small boy’s head, and his tender skin, and his scabbed and dirty knees. The small cottage behind him now, with thatched steep roof and hard mud walls, and the small back room and the horse with the swayed back and the bog in front of the gate and the farmer with hard rough hands on the other side of the bog, calling the boy to come pet the horse. The horse! The boy out only for a walk down the long road to see the sheep and the shimmery sea far off to the left, a small blue finger poked into the rocky eye of land, and he knew in a month they would be on that sea, rocking and bucking the wide and windy white capped sea to America and a new home. He only wanted to see the water, the blue, and the wide expanse of his imagination skipping across a tabletop of ocean to disappear on the far side forever, and be forever gone.
An eye to the sea and the cottage with the swayed back horse, and the strange farmer all alone telling him to come pet the sad-eyed horse, looking up at the boy, and there were even more in the field behind the house, wouldn’t he like to see all the horses? And the boy’s father had no horses, had nothing but the fields and the potatoes and the forgiving sky overhead, and the boy crossed the bog.
The boy crossed the bog. The farmer opened the gate. The sad-eyed horse looked at the boy. The boy followed the farmer to the shed and the farmer sat for a moment on a stool and gave the boy the oat bucket to take to the horse. The farmer’s rough and hard hands dipped into the fresh oats and he let them slip slowly through his dirty rough fingers, while he looked up at the boy and smiled with desire, so close to the boy, and the young boy took the bucket and fed the swayed back horse and the horse ate the oats and wouldn’t the boy like to come get some more and feed the horses in the back, and the boy had wanted to take a walk as far out as he could to see the blue sea and imagine how their steamer would ride the waves and leave all of Ireland behind, so he did walk down the long road with the rocks under his feet, and he passed the farmer’s house, and he crossed the bog, and the boy fed the swayed back horse, and he took his eye off the sea, and he followed the farmer through the small back door into the small room at the back of the cottage. And the horses in the field scattered. And the boy did not hear the late afternoon breeze tip over the empty oat bucket, or hear the crickets in the bog, or the swallows in the air, or a distant sheep, or the quiet of the late afternoon, or the wailing of the sea on the rocky and unyielding faraway coastline. And the boy had wanted to take a walk to see the blue finger of sea that would take from him all that would be remembered in Ireland.
Michael stood.
Indulgentiam, absolutionem et remissionem
(May the Lord Almighty and Merciful Lord)
He bowed his head.
Peccatorum nostrorum tributat nobis omnipotens et misericors dominus
(Grant thee pardon, absolution, and remission)
He didn’t know how he could ever face Lily.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
(In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen)
He walked out of the funeral mass and into falling snow.
John McCluskey has had poetry, fiction, non-fiction and visual art published extensively worldwide. A Moment of Fireflies was published in 2017, I Will Listen If You Tell Me Who I Am, a book pf poetry and short fiction, was published in 2019, and Ogden's Proverb was published in 2022. John has worked in the IT industry and has a Masters in Writing (MAW) from Manhattanville College in New York. He lives in Connecticut with his wife.
https://www.johnmccluskeyauthor.com/
When Michael reached the corner, he saw a funeral procession approach, heading toward the church. Michael stopped at the corner and tried to light a cigarette. A gust of wind blew out the flame. The sun burst out watering his tired eyes. He lit another match successfully and took a long pull, closing his eyes briefly in response to the throbbing in his head. He stayed on the corner and watched the cars slowly turn and head toward the church. He studied each car for its passengers: adults with solemn faces and a few children who did not look like they understood how they were supposed to feel, trying to look genuinely sad though the sorrow appeared to be at the thinnest level afforded that of a distant relative. The line of six cars stopped in front of the church where a group had already gathered – a small but respectable funeral – and Michael saw six men approach the funeral coach and slide the casket out.
The simple wooden casket was carried up the steps, and a small but sufficient gathering stood in bundled up reverence around it before it disappeared into the church. Michael stood at the corner a bit longer and continued studying the scene. He had focused on the group intently as it gathered around the casket before entering the church. He imagined there were close friends and aunts and uncles. Some of the men stood together and smoked; the women crossed themselves as the casket passed; a few children wandered up the steps looking for something else to do while the grownups occupied themselves with the solemn duty of respect for the dead. He wondered if it was a man or a woman in the casket, what their life was like, and who the closest ones left behind were.
As he studied the group, and the sun washed the street and continued to water his eyes, he fixed his stare on a young thin woman and a boy. He instantly knew the person in the casket was a man, and a husband and father at that. The thin woman’s head was bowed, her face was covered, and her hand was on a young boy’s shoulder ... a boy about the age of nine or ten years old. The boy did not join the other children but stood close by his mother, preferring to feel the familiar weight of her hand extending its protection against a confusing tragedy well underway. Michael felt instantly small and hopelessly out of place, even on the far perimeter of the woman’s presence. He thought of Lily, and he struggled briefly to steady himself, and he looked away, as if trying to avoid some quiet recognition of something better left unsaid. He threw his cigarette butt down on the sidewalk, stepped on it, and immediately lit another. His nose began to run from the cold; he sniffed and swallowed uncomfortably. The sidewalk in front of the church had cleared but for a few stragglers, and Michael turned toward the church and headed for the funeral.
Michael approached the stairs of the church. Two men stood outside. One of the men glanced over at Michael but said nothing. Michael pulled up his coat collar to avoid further attention, and he quietly and unassumingly entered the church.
The group had spread out across the front three pews on either side of the center aisle. Michael found a seat off to one side towards the back where he would not be noticed. Safely and respectfully removed from the others, he sat down with a clear view of the mother and son, though he was not sure why he came into the church, or what he hoped to gain in the presence of grief-stricken strangers. The casket lay at the front of the center aisle. The sun, illuminating the stained-glass windows and creating rectangles of light on the floor, did not touch the casket, or the woman, or the boy. The priest appeared and made the sign of the cross.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
(In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.)
Michael focused on the ritual of the mass: standing and sitting on cue, kneeling on cue, every movement robotic. His disassociation from the emotional impact and the people involved gave him immediate peace, however thin. He didn’t hear the sounds of tears, the occasional child’s voice, the loud echo of a kneeler dropped suddenly to the tile floor, or the responses to the priest, as the sunlight gradually found the casket, traveling its length slowly and in concert with the mass. Perhaps this was the reason he came: to see a stranger succumb to a devastating power over him, as if another’s young pain would justify his own. But an immediate abhorrence of himself for taking any refuge at all in the suffering of another – especially a young child – reclaimed him. He craved a cigarette and a drink, feeling the familiarity of self-loathing, and he began to panic knowing neither was available.
Introibo ad altere Dei.
(I will go unto the altar of God)
Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.
(To God who giveth joy to my youth.)
Michael looked at the casket, as the priest spoke, and then at the young boy. He could see the side of the young boy’s face clearly enough from his distant seat; he studied it thoroughly. His dark, wet hair was neat and matted down, except for a determined cowlick, the crooked hairline revealing a hasty job performed out of necessity. His ample ears grew ahead of the rest of his features, a small scrape defaced his supple cheek, and the collective sorrow revealed in these particulars caused Michael to think of David and see him in the same way he saw the boy at the head of the church. He took in deeply his son’s very being, knowing this image was gone at the very moment he was savoring its innocence. David should not have to be any older than he is right now, but he rides the streetcars and pays the bills, with scabs on his knees and overly large, crooked teeth, which time will address. The loss to come of his son’s young days always felt so permanent to Michael, long before it happened and especially now. He couldn’t process this sense of permanence, and the boy in the church, his own beloved son, that house in Ireland, and his need for drink so focused Michael on the quiet march of time in the impossible state of the present that he uttered an unexpected sound at the intrusive thought. He knew others in the church must have heard it; he felt his cheeks flush in embarrassment, and he turned away, looking in every direction, as if an explanation for all abrupt extractions from innocence could be found in the sublime shades of light and darkness resident in the church.
Requiem aeternam dona eis,
Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis.
(Eternal rest grant unto them,
O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them.)
The congregation stood, and the shifting posture of grief pulled Michael out of his fixation but not out of his disquietude. He thirsted so and began to sweat a little despite the cold and drafty church. He glanced again at the young boy, and the scar on his cheek reminded him of his son’s swollen lip, and he hung his head in shame.
He didn’t know what time he had arrived home last night.
Kyrie eleison
(Lord have mercy)
He didn’t know how he broke the table, but he knew he did.
Christe eleison
(Christ have mercy)
And he knew he had somehow hurt his son.
Kyrie eleison
(Lord have mercy)
The damage done to him as a boy was reaching his son, through him, and Michael was shaken by this realization while also betrayed by the lack of magnificence and absolution thought to inhabit the tender beginnings of truth, no matter how rough.
The sunlight on the casket shimmered briefly off its handles. “I don’t know what to do.” The thought grabbed Michael directly; its sheer simplicity chilled him. He shivered for a moment, and his eyes began to fill, but he felt angry at the physical reaction to a brave admission of the tumult occurring within him.
His son. How could he have hurt him so, he had to stop. He hoped no one would turn to look at him and discover such a detestable stranger at the funeral. How he detested himself!
Requiem aeternam dona eis,
Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis.
(Eternal rest grant unto them,
O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them)
He looked at the casket and thought how much better off his family would be if he were the one in permanent repose inside that box. Oh, the dead! His thoughts turned to his dead father, and his mother in a sad and ready state, her soft soul forever sinking at the loss of its mate. He thought of his two brothers born to die in a great influenza outbreak with so many others. He thought of everyone he knew who had died, and those he didn’t know, and he wondered where they all were now, millions and millions of the dead, who had come and gone over time, long forgotten, most of whom the living couldn’t possibly know ever existed. How many had died unhappy, hurt, betrayed? Were they all forgiven; would he be as well? Oh, the impact upon a boy’s spirit when broken by the early removal of a father, or love, or dignity. Oh, Ireland, and the abortive self! Michael grabbed the back of the pew in front of him with both hands despite a shooting pain reminding him yet again of last night. He detected a faint scent of carnations, theirs the delicate and ancient fragrance of death he had come to know kneeling at the flowered caskets of so many dead relatives. He then thought he heard a distressing wail of despair and the collapse of someone consumed by grief at burial. He grew frightened by the overwhelming thoughts and imagined sensory experiences, and he sat down slowly.
The priest spoke in preparation of administering Holy Communion. Michael remained seated and did not take communion at the mass of the dead. He looked up instead, to watch the people stand and move in line toward the casket and the chalice in order to give his mind ease, and occupy it with the motion of others. Then he saw the boy in the front pew looking towards the back of the church, as if he too might be searching for answers. The two strangers locked eyes for the briefest moment before turning away. Michael dropped to his knees. “If only I could pray.” He had tried in church earlier that morning, but he did not feel he was worthy of being heard. He was desperate to try again, thinking the ear of God to be most available when most invisible, but he could not properly prepare his mind, as if prayer was an act he could control. He couldn’t stop thinking about last night, his son’s age, and how he hated himself at ten years old, and it made him thirst even more and crave yet another cigarette. His heart began to beat faster, and he felt clammy and short of breath, as the sun lit the foot of the casket and was soon to die on the floor, though Michael missed the passage of light.
The sight of a ten-year-old boy ... my son ... reminds me of being ten years old in Ireland, Michael admitted to himself, every time I see him.
He took a deep breath to steady himself, but the perfumed air in the wintertime church turned his stomach, as the priest incensed the coffin. “Why did I go inside that house?”
Requiem aeternam dona eis,
Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis.
(Eternal rest grant unto them,
O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them)
The prayer Michael needed to find came at last. He remained on his knees but did not close his eyes; he did not bow his head; he did not pick up a prayer book; he did not make the sign of the cross, or ask for forgiveness; he did not pray the Our Father, the Hail Mary, or the Act of Contrition; he did not look at the boy in the front of the church, though he hoped that the boy would return to loving his father after his anger at being abandoned had become small enough. He asked only that he remember it exactly as it happened. And he did.
How long the dusty road through the meadows and the gentle slope of hills and the small loose flock of sheep aimlessly grazing on the uplift of land and the low rock walls snaking across the springtime land of brown and green, a tumble of boulder here and there, fallen from the wall, and the walls would lose their shape eventually, the fine work of the farmer’s hand no longer admired, and the last of the rocks would lie scattered and forever out of place and the late afternoon sun behind him now with clouds to smear the orange and pink of the coming evening, in the evening hours, when boys were home to finish the day’s work on the land with their fathers.
How dusty the long road home, so late, and the rocks beneath his feet, so tender and young. He should be home, the tender skin to bloom in its own time. So alone down the road with the sky and the sun to drop behind a cloud for but a moment and scatter the beckoning arms of light across the grand and forever forgiving sky high above the brown whorl of hair on the crown of the small boy’s head, and his tender skin, and his scabbed and dirty knees. The small cottage behind him now, with thatched steep roof and hard mud walls, and the small back room and the horse with the swayed back and the bog in front of the gate and the farmer with hard rough hands on the other side of the bog, calling the boy to come pet the horse. The horse! The boy out only for a walk down the long road to see the sheep and the shimmery sea far off to the left, a small blue finger poked into the rocky eye of land, and he knew in a month they would be on that sea, rocking and bucking the wide and windy white capped sea to America and a new home. He only wanted to see the water, the blue, and the wide expanse of his imagination skipping across a tabletop of ocean to disappear on the far side forever, and be forever gone.
An eye to the sea and the cottage with the swayed back horse, and the strange farmer all alone telling him to come pet the sad-eyed horse, looking up at the boy, and there were even more in the field behind the house, wouldn’t he like to see all the horses? And the boy’s father had no horses, had nothing but the fields and the potatoes and the forgiving sky overhead, and the boy crossed the bog.
The boy crossed the bog. The farmer opened the gate. The sad-eyed horse looked at the boy. The boy followed the farmer to the shed and the farmer sat for a moment on a stool and gave the boy the oat bucket to take to the horse. The farmer’s rough and hard hands dipped into the fresh oats and he let them slip slowly through his dirty rough fingers, while he looked up at the boy and smiled with desire, so close to the boy, and the young boy took the bucket and fed the swayed back horse and the horse ate the oats and wouldn’t the boy like to come get some more and feed the horses in the back, and the boy had wanted to take a walk as far out as he could to see the blue sea and imagine how their steamer would ride the waves and leave all of Ireland behind, so he did walk down the long road with the rocks under his feet, and he passed the farmer’s house, and he crossed the bog, and the boy fed the swayed back horse, and he took his eye off the sea, and he followed the farmer through the small back door into the small room at the back of the cottage. And the horses in the field scattered. And the boy did not hear the late afternoon breeze tip over the empty oat bucket, or hear the crickets in the bog, or the swallows in the air, or a distant sheep, or the quiet of the late afternoon, or the wailing of the sea on the rocky and unyielding faraway coastline. And the boy had wanted to take a walk to see the blue finger of sea that would take from him all that would be remembered in Ireland.
Michael stood.
Indulgentiam, absolutionem et remissionem
(May the Lord Almighty and Merciful Lord)
He bowed his head.
Peccatorum nostrorum tributat nobis omnipotens et misericors dominus
(Grant thee pardon, absolution, and remission)
He didn’t know how he could ever face Lily.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
(In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen)
He walked out of the funeral mass and into falling snow.
John McCluskey has had poetry, fiction, non-fiction and visual art published extensively worldwide. A Moment of Fireflies was published in 2017, I Will Listen If You Tell Me Who I Am, a book pf poetry and short fiction, was published in 2019, and Ogden's Proverb was published in 2022. John has worked in the IT industry and has a Masters in Writing (MAW) from Manhattanville College in New York. He lives in Connecticut with his wife.
https://www.johnmccluskeyauthor.com/
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