pioneertown.

THE CAILLEACH

October 27
It is the last October Gail will ever see, and winter’s teeth bite the horizon. She carries garlic cloves to the garden bed, and realizes she cannot plant them. She can no longer kneel to touch the soil. She can no longer spot a perfect stone and squat to pick it up. The rocks in her pockets come from her granddaughter. She likes to hold them, feel them warm to the pulse in her palm. All her life, she’s had warm hands. Today they are cold.

Night
Skin the frosty blue of cold-method indigo dye. Beetle blue land, sky black and starless. The moon a trilling egg beside her head. It fits into her palm, warms it. She looks down and there’s her house. The fire’s gone out. She kneels. Peers through the window. Her eyelashes wisp the glass. Inside, the sucking presence of nothing. She stands and replaces the moon. Velvet grasses tongue her feet. The town tessellates with light. She strolls into the flat meadows. Her pockets sag. The seams split, and her granddaughter’s boulders pound the ground one by one. When she wakes tomorrow: hills.

October 28
Her hands tremble at breakfast and knock over the glass bottle. Milk blooms across the table and onto the hardwood floor. Her slippers sop. She is too tired to fetch towels, so stands in the pool, trying not to feel shame, until her son and his husband open the door. While they kiss her forehead, and clean the spill, and try to hide their worried glances, she watches out the window. Her granddaughter hollers through a pair of hills she cannot remember being there before.

Night
Beside her, a hurricane-sized cow. Gargantuan tin bucket, lavender milk steaming. Her hands smell of the cow’s nipples. Her skirt laps the breeze, stout as fog. Loose, her hair reaches into the sky like branches at a window. Lightning cuts the night, births stars. The cow startles, moaning. Gail settle her, but kicks the bucket. Together they wade in the new milk lake, marveling at the reflection of the newborn sky.

October 29
The house grows cold. She wakes in the cloud of her own breath. Her son arrives and builds a fire with her last soft log. He carries her down the front porch steps so she can walk slowly, slowly to the pond between the hills. Only Gail knows that yesterday there was no pond. Her granddaughter waits with peanuts for the crows to eat from her hands. She is restless, kicking the water, and the crows do not come.

Night
She begins with breath. Her lungs are the core of her power. They burn, delicious, as the storms rumble out of her. She stirs up fat clouds to scour the sky. Electricity shrieks from her vagus nerve. She cackles and pounds her feet to make thunder.
You!
Hear the piano cacophony of trees as they shatter!
Feel the nourishing violence of rain!

October 30
Her son and his family sleep in Gail’s living room through the thundering night. They do not say it is to keep an eye on her. In the morning they eat oatmeal with maple syrup and blueberries. Her granddaughter splashes cream across stout mugs of coffee. Gail holds her small, sweaty hand as the boys chop the storm-felled oaks. They frown, rosy and damp, murmuring below the volume Gail can hear. Before the leave, they call in a truckload of seasoned firewood to get her through winter.

Night
It is every February there ever will be. You may mistake her for an old, soft mountain, but she rises from her slumber and sees her woodpile has thinned. The fate of each winter, this winter, gathers in her long fingers, gossamer. Should she sleep and allow spring? Should she rise, harvest firewood, and allow winter to linger?
Clouds, fitful, reach for one another across the sun. Her giant cow turns her head and lows. An infinity of crows arc in from a periwinkle nowhere and settle on her shoulders.

October 31
For the holiday, her granddaughter dresses as fire. Poppy red sweater and orange hunting pants. Yellow light-up sneakers. Gail’s favorite red silk scarf for a flaming cape. A crown of the last, bedraggled calendula flowers. She sits in Gail’s blue wool lap, overtired and begging for gummies. The boys take pictures of her, the wiggling goddess of the hearth.

Night
She wakes a final time as shepherd of the roe deer. She bends with strong knees and leads them with her great, cold hand to where sweet grass nubs up from snow.
Here, boil fog.
Here, cry sleet.
Here, seize the lake into frozen waves.
Deep in her body the garlic bulbs wait, bears slumber, squirrels give birth to their pink blind young. A fox flings up to dive into snow, and leaves a vibrant moon of blood.
To her home she sends crows. Her sons will consider them a sign. They will bring her granddaughter their glinting treasures, and, in time, may eat from her impatient, blazing hand.