The Good People

no plant is a poison to the one who knows how to use it.’

Only the birds above her and, in the slow unpeeling of darkness, a divinity of sky.

There were those who did not catch to the fabric of the world.

she had understood, finally, why people feared the darkness. It was an open door, and you could step through it and be changed. Be touched and altered.

And they were familiar with death. In her small house Nóra could see that her neighbours were making room for sorrow in the way they knew to be best.

It had stirred embers of memory she had thought long dead. Things she had willed herself to forget.

Her whole body ached. It often did after a night of keening. As soon as Nance left any corpse house, a great, pulsing headache would swell in her skull. ’Tis the borrowed grief, thought Nance. To stand in the doorway between life and death racks the body and bleeds the brain.

The dead are close,

All this time past, the years lived through,