Son of Seanfhocail

by Joseph Gilbride

Buoyed by the dawn fog, you flutter over the old suburb, its evenly spaced woods and sturdy playgrounds and arterials rutted with commuter traffic.

Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.

Outside the coronary care unit, you permeate the pores of a small glass window. You’re in Room 305, where you find the old man cocooned in tight bedclothes, the better to keep pressure on his long-failing vasculature. His head is propped on three pillows, his eyes are shut, his mouth a downcast crescent. Your tubular proboscis unfurls. You search his brittle beard. His cheeks are flush, yet cold, like your hands, which haven’t felt warmth in a spell. Your squamate fingers pry open the old man’s eyelids and pinch the jellied eggs from their nooks. You eat them, and they taste of the sea.

Bíonn súil le muir ach ní bhíonn súil le tír.

As eyes go, you have 17,000, yet you fail to notice the thicket of balloons beside the bed. A dangling string snags your wings on the way back to the window, and you crash into the radiator. Between its scalding ribs you hear the high-pitched reel of a tin whistle. The cut and strike. Outside, the dawn fog is braiding over the old places. The glen that lent the town its name, where the wild-running stream was pinched into a culvert to accommodate more lanes of arterial. Where the old man once made you release the gecko you stole from some sawgrass in front of the Cocoa Beach timeshare.

Filleann an feall ar an bhfeallaire.

On the far wall, the keening of a banshee machine startles you. Inside its screen, black as peat, a thin green line hums. A nurse in strawberry scrubs marches into the room, presses a finger to the old man’s neck, pauses, frowns.

Another machine is wheeled around the bed. A rubber tentacle stretched over the old man’s body. A suction cup appendage on his heart. More frowning. A gentle brush of fingers over thin hair. In comes a doctor, collar blotted with coffee. She repeats the pulse-checking, then produces a small flashlight. You linger by the radiator, wherein the wind is hissing through the grass of a high barrow, while you’re digesting eyeballs.

Níl luibh ná leigheas in aghaidh an bháis.

The doctor lifts the old man’s left eyelid and with her flashlight inspects the hollow space beneath. But the void escapes her close assessment, for she has only two eyes and not 17,000. She clicks off her light and there’s frowning all around. A clipboard is pulled from the wall. Notes are scribed.

A familiar heat takes shape in your gut, but there’s a chill in your head. A draft from the window. The fog from outside is breaching the room, phasing through the windowpane, and a great white cloud smothers the ward in the smell of ammonia. You have little time. But with grace, the doctor and nurse sign the clipboard and leave. Warmth travels up your throat. Wings beating, you fly back to the bed and float above the old man and for a moment that isn’t a moment at all, you take him in. His open-mouthed frown, long and concave—the telltale grimace of ghosthood. How often, you wonder, had he smiled since he lost you?

The floor quivers with the caustic fidget of invading fog. Your proboscis unfurls once more and dips into the old man’s mouth. Heat drills at your sinuses, and you sneeze golden mucus down his throat.

An rud a ghoilleas ar an gcroí caithfidh an t-súil é a shileas.

If anyone could see you they’d restrain you, but now all eyes are absent in the ward. The first time you did this, to a poor old woman who’d broken her spine falling down a flight of stairs, you felt odd and predatory, but after many such encounters you came to understand the nature of metamorphosis, how profane and tough to swallow. As snot anoints the old man’s insides, your proboscis curls up like a fiddlehead fern.

And if each of your 17,000 eyes had tear ducts, you might flood the room and swamp the machines. But anatomy fails you, and so too does memory. You can’t recall the first seanfhocail he taught you when you were a pupa and he was everything.

Is í an eorna nua tú a fheiceáil.

His arms burst from the bedsheets and wrap around you. You’re stunned. You thought no one, especially he, could see you. Or touch you. Yet through the silky membrane of your wings, you feel his fingers playing a pit-a-pat reel. 340,000 fingers. Warm and alive.

More than all the doctors and nurses and patients in their varying states of unease, you understand eternity, yet the embrace ends before you’re ready. Just as he’s coming to the bridge, vitality leaches from his limbs and they fall to the bed.

Níl sa saol ach gaoth agus toit.

Fog rises. The bed is entombed, your old man cloaked in white. And the cloud lifts him, yanking up the sheets until they tear away. He’s ferried out the window, over the traffic and the old glen, where you’d found the poor gecko’s carcass a month after you released it and your old man told you how naive you’d been to remove it from where it belonged, the warm gardens of the tropics, and then you remember it. The first seanfhocail. And you want to tell him, the way he told you, but somewhere at the fringe of the woods his body dissolves into the morning.

In the ward, you’re left to the inert beeping of monitors. You flutter to the radiator and press your ear to it. Only numb heat and silence respond, and when you go to the window, hoping to pass back through, you feel the cold integrity of glass.

Nuair a thiocas an bás ní imeoidh sé folamh.