Down before the gray bastions of cumulonimbus, down before the shoulder mountains and the house spattered green combes, perched like a broken stone set on a cold curling finger (the River Garavogue) was the town of Sligo. Some called it a city though it wasn't much of one. I traveled all the way there in the saint stained belly of a 747 and up all those twisting miles from Shannon just to visit the stretch of his grave. Fairly under-whelmed when I finally touched it. The black granite polished by a sander, the sharp and even letters still pebbled by the passing December rain. I didn't even visit the adjacent chapel to offer a prayer for his genius, but instead forced myself to photograph his headstone. Three shots, digital and faint to the ear, like a cricket failing between the boards. Then I turned my camera on a tall Celtic cross that bore a crowded legend I stopped believing a long time ago. I was careful to keep my shots low so as not to catch the highway in the frame. The passing trucks rattling with their hollow dairy cans, the wet stone wall, the mountains and sooty low rooftops in the distance crowned with stark white satellite dishes. Tower cranes.
    -What are you doing?"
    A brown bearded, barrel-shaped man stalked out of the chapel behind me. He had one prosthetic arm hooking out from a greasy sleeve of his canvas coat.
    I pointed at the headstone.
    -Eh. Who's that buried there then?
    I am more than half-embarrassed. I feel stupid. Humiliated.
    -It's Yeats. The poet.
    The one armed man snorted and waved his claw as he headed to his snug little car in the parking lot.
    -Never read'm.
    That night at my hotel I crashed a wedding. The bride and groom had found their bed hours before, and they left behind relatives and friends madly alive and in full whirl. The air was soured with slopped drink, sweat and gray smoke, and I remember staring intently into all those faces, drinking away the world as they did.
    Eyes generous, eyes battered with envy, eyes amorous, eyes looking for a fight.
    And then I saw an old man who looked a lot like my grandfather. His pink and blue eyes seemed to search for logic and beauty in every single thing in the wide ballroom, hoping to solve once and for all a riddle or a curse.



About the author:
As a half-assed raconteur brooding outside of Annapolis, Maryland, Kieran Shea is constantly bewildered by casually sacrificed intellects. His fiction has appeared in ThugLit, and he firmly believes everyone is guilty of something.

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