“How We Began” by Richard Ballon

Character: Cormac Heaney: Mid-thirties, Irish. Beatles cut hair, black trousers, tweed jacket. Time is 1961. He is sitting on a stool, as if he’s in a pub.

Summers found me and Billy at his uncle’s for the stray weekend. Billy’s Da was a bookie and there were times when it was better for his family to get lost, especially when negotiating was in order. I would tag along, my parent’s keen to let go of one of their brood of eight.  Billy’s uncle, it was, who pegged me the name Bramble. That boy, growing like a weed so fast his legs aint caught up to the size of them knees, and its the bramble grows quick, can’t catch up with itself. Them two boys is their own thicket.

Outside his stone house, the turf loomed large, after the lanes of Cork and when the wind combed the heather it was not unlike the sea beneath the green swell of two hills called the Paps.

The Paps were small rounded hills, near identical, with a kidney shaped pond nesting in the hollow. The old ones said they were the breasts of the goddess Anu. Everyone knew if the local priest had his way, he would have changed their shape. As it was, Billy’s uncle and some friends, one night, scaled the hills and rebuilt the cairns on top, so that Sunday morning on the way to Mass the farmers gawked, for now those soft green mounds had  nipples. A couple of young hands adjusted trousers as some of the younger men looked dreamily out the window paying no heed to the rant of Father Flaherty.

A lady, large as the lake itself was said to slumber in the kidney shaped pond where she sang melodies which lured stray men to their death, whose bones were found, after years, polished and white as the teeth of her smile. But it was the drink that sucked the occasional man into the bog, without even a toe showing to let the bereaved know.

Some days Billy and I would lay on the heath, create armies from clouds before scrambling into the shells of the hungry cottages; the homes that had collapsed and now pockmark our country.

Once, close to one of these windowless walls, we saw a glint in the grass and thinking, yes the treasure now is ours, we crept close and cautious, in case it was a peephole of bog winking through the grass. When we kneeled, all hush, our excitement pushing air in our bellies, we saw it was a mirror, its cool glass reflecting the sky.

Someone threw it away, Billy said. During the hunger, folks threw their mirrors out their yards, down the yawning hungry mouths of their wells, because they couldn’t stand watching themselves being eaten by the hunger.

We peered and saw our own faces like ghosts, separated by a crack, and it was then, in the mirror I saw his lips and felt them kiss my cheek and  since then, the sky has never been so blue.

Richard Ballon’s writing has been performed at the Manhattan Theater Source’s Sola Voces / Estrogenius Festival, at Stage Left’s Women at Work Festival, MaMADrama and Left Out Festivals, NativeAlien’s Short Stories 5 and Emerging Artist Theater’s One Woman Standing, One Man Talking Fests. Richard is a member of the Dramatist’s Guild.