Simply Said Simply Said Master June 2018 | Page 44
Blasket
The following is a short extract from a novella that I wrote last summer
and which I called Blasket. I do hope you like it.
Prologue
How is it possible to return to somewhere you’ve never been? He was
not just an entire ocean but, from appearances, also fifty years distant
from Portland, Maine, and Portland had to be at least another fifty
years behind New York. Yet, despite all that time and distance, he was
once more looking at an island on the other side of a turbulent sound,
just as he’d so often done from his own weather-smeared window on
Maiden Cove.
Jack Sullivan didn’t notice the girl who was clearing away the
breakfast things from his table on a hill, halfway between Dunquin and
the lowering cloud layer above it. He was peering intently through the
dank drizzle and counting too many years since he’d actually sat
behind the helm of a fishing boat.
He was also asking himself how any island could exude such a
brooding presence, or maybe that was just Blasket and the weather. It
just lay there like a sulking skulking hulk, more like a huge dog left out in
the rain. It stank of resignation to an undeserved fate with the added
insult of not being recognised, or acknowledged by someone who
should know better.
He was in Kerry hoping to join some dots. Ideally, he would stand on
the same patch of land his ancestors worked to make his existence
possible. That done, he would satisfy his diasporic urge to turn over
some of the same sods that they had, just to feel the dirt under his
fingernails. That act might, hopefully, quench the otherwise totally
illogical compulsion to come full circle.
Jack was a fisherman with an understandable disdain for farming and
farmers, and this had injected more than a small measure of insanity
into the whole business. It had come to the point of him seriously
considering if he wasn’t bei ng haunted across the ocean and the
years. He’d more or less settled on the notion of some errant
agricultural forebear committing an atrocity, which he had to
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