I

When Johnny returned home from Dublin his Ma told him to ask St. Anthony to find him a nice girl. He did – half taking the piss, half wondering if it might work.

.

II

Johnny stands in the aisle, ready to press his tongue forward – not too eagerly. His hands gently crossed, waiting patiently to step forward for the body of Christ.

Amen.

.

III

Fr. Michael looked great for his age, the men joked it was because he didn’t have a wife to turn him grey. The women at mass doted on him, waiting one by one to shake his hand and thank him for a lovely service as they walked out. It wasn’t that Johnny didn’t like Fr. Michael, he was a bit too charismatic for him. Johnny liked a dry-aged priest. He enjoyed Rambo though, Fr. Michael’s Jack Russell. Rambo had a habit of following the priest into mass and laying down by the altar. Rambo kept an eye on the village. If Rambo barked – cattle had broken loose. He was a muscular little dog with soft eyes. On a Friday, he would hang around outside the post office to play with the children walking from the primary school up to the pitches. He always kept to the side of the road, sometimes bouncing through the ditches in the summer when they overgrew with grass. Rambo, unknowingly, became a central character to the village since Fr. Michael arrived.

.

III

After Maura was buried, Johnny started praying to St. Anthony again. He would ask St. Anthony to find her. He would search for pieces of her left behind that weren’t packed away. A pink cushion roller that had fallen beneath the bed. A bobby pin or an old receipt stowed away at the bottom of a drawer, some sterling from family trips. Johnny got into the habit of flicking on the radio every time he entered the house. The house had gotten quiet. Maura used to constantly be talking to someone on the phone. When the kids introduced her to a mobile phone, she became unstoppable – Johnny would be sent on a walk every few days to buy phone credit and milk. The kids called less, he didn’t mind. Johnny loved them but didn’t really understand how to make conversation on the phone. Sometimes he would pick up her mobile to call and ask them to visit or for him to go to them, but he didn’t have it in him and didn’t want to upset them with Maura’s number appearing across their screens. Maura was the outgoing one, the gravity that pulled a family together.

.

IV

Going to mass every morning meant he spent the beginning of each day in company. He felt more connected to the people around him, rather than on the phone or radio. Mass reassured him that Maura was in heaven, that one day he’d be able to be with her again. This was all just a waiting game.

.

V

He read an opinion piece in the newspaper by a woman in co. Clare who had had a near death experience. She said her entire life flashed before her eyes in a few seconds. He prayed that it was true and it would happen to him. Maura smiling with hay fever swollen eyes by the ditch in front of a blooming rapeseed field one summer. His sons walking through the airport gate after two years in America. His daughter gripping the nook of his arm on her wedding day. All the kids boxing each other over the last Iceberg in their old summer caravan. Watching Maura stroke their daughter’s hair, sobbing over her first break up.

All again, imagine.

.

VI

He hadn’t found a trace of Maura in weeks. He tried his best not to look on purpose, to only save his prayers to St. Anthony on a very bad day. It would be worse if there was nothing really left, little pieces that existed as if she was still there. Little pieces that didn’t know she was buried.

.

VII

Johnny’s knees had started to swell up with arthritis, from running up down the farm years ago. Jobs around the house had become difficult. He made sure he never let on. He would try his best to clean the house every Wednesday. He would have to lay a pillow down every time he loaded and unloaded the washing machine. Some days he’d pull over a chair, but it didn’t help much with the reaching down and the pulling.

.

VIII

He tipped the dregs of curdled milk into his tea to blossom the black to his shade of beige. He gently rinsed the milk jug, placing it aside by a bouquet of yellow-bellied daisies. Met Éireann predicted a swell of low pressure crossing the country.

.

VIII

Johnny waited one day and one night to be sure that the hills would be weeping down to the ditches. Hills of darkened gorse ran by his car window. A silver square carrying the mark of St. Christopher hung from his mirror, jumping with the car over potholes.

.

VIII

The moss on the hills of the grotto cried out ribbons of rainwater, a curtain of heavy drops covered the face of Mary shrouded in blue. Johnny brought his fingers slowly to his forehead, his chest, left and right shoulder. The wind had started to catch the rim of his milk jug. He placed the carton underneath a mossy stream to gather the grotto’s water. He slowly bent down to roll up the edges of his pants above white knees with think purple veins. Steadying himself against the fence, he knelt. He knelt against the cutting edges of gravel stuck in tarmac and rainwater. He knelt to feel the pain in his knees. He knelt to feel the guilt. The guilt of never asking Maura if her knees hurt when she did the washing, if her hands hurt drying dishes, if it hurt. If it hurt to be in a hospice but not at home – it’s what the kids wanted. If it hurt to be in that bed, if it hurt when a young student on placement helped her to go to the bathroom. If it hurt when they put tubes up her nose. If dying hurt. If telling the nurses to put DNR on the door hurt. If dying in the middle of the night in a house of strangers hurt.

.

IX

Ár Mary has puffy eyes clouded in smudged mascara. She likes to run barefoot with bloody soles. Her soul and body carry royal stretchmarks of childbirth. She hates hiding beneath a blue cloak, she hates the fear of a body of motherhood. Ár Mary is grieving, ár Mary is angry. She mourns her daughters and sons. When the holy men gathered at a council, they eradicated the traces of her other children. She found ink, a needle and a one-eyed hag to have I AM THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION traced into her chest beneath her collarbones, above where her babies hung from her nipples. Ár Mary is sharp-tongued and proud. She understands pain. Ár Mary took a scissors to the hair that her children used to pull into little dimpled fists.

.

X

Ár Mary sees a red-nosed man kneeling in the mud. She steps forward, leaving a trail of bloody footprints down the moss. Johnny sees a mother with purple marks on her belly like Maura had after three children. He begins to sob as she kneels beside him, milk trailing in small droplets from her nipples for the mouths of ghosts to feed on.

He asks her if it hurts as she takes his body into her arms and he begins to slump in the mud.