The Unquiet Land

excerpt

When she became pregnant out of wedlock she lost her job as a teacher, and her father threw her out of the house. Bought her a train ticket, gave her some money and sent her away to live with her brother, her only other relative across the country in Dingwall. He was a grocer with a wife and three children, all older than Padraig. He was a rigid Christian, but showed little Christian charity where Padraig and his mother were concerned. He and his wife, who thoroughly resented Padraig’s mother being in the house, used and abused her as no more than a servant. Even as her pregnancy advanced. The children wanted to know how Padraig’s mother was having a baby when she didn’t have a husband. As Padraig grew, the children at home and at school made his life a misery. Then Padraig started having his fits. That was the last straw. His uncle accused Padraig’s mother of having slept with the Devil and produced a son of Satan. He ordered her out of the house, with a small bag of personal belongings and no money. ‘The Devil looks after his own,’ Padraig remembers him saying.”
“So what did she do?” Michael asked. “Alone and penniless with a nine-year old boy who suffered seizures.”
“She took to the roads on foot,” Caitlin replied. “Looking back on it later, Padraig thinks she was trying to make it back to Plockton, only this time she had no train ticket. Together they simply headed west, sleeping rough in fields or barns or haysheds, begging for food like gypsies. She didn’t make it. She was not healthy. Padraig remembers her coughing up blood.”
“Consumption?”
“Yes. And it killed her. Padraig doesn’t know where she died. He was so young and afraid and he ran away. What he was afraid of, I never did find out, and Padraig didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to press him to tell me in case it brought on a seizure.”
“So Padraig made it on his own to …. what did you call it?”
“Plockton,” Caitlin said. “I think he must have got lost or missed the way because, according to my father, he turned up in this other Kyle place, where the doctor took him in.”
“What a story,” Michael said. “It’s hard to believe. Are you sure Padraig isn’t making it up?”
“That’s not the end of it,” Caitlin declared. “Because of his fits, the people in Kyle-whatever were afraid of Padraig. They said, as many did, that he was a child of Satan who had come straight from Hell.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763203

Nikos Engonopoulos – Poems

The Last Appearance of Juda the Iscariot
The small American city lost among the endless plains
of Ayrton, lost that serenity it has been familiar with
since the days of around 1867 when it was founded.
Often, around midnight, a strange sullen man entered
the best-secured houses and disturbed the sleeping
people, it stirred their peaceful consciousness, embittered
their hearts with a metal flute he played perfectly, he
awakened in all of them, an intense, tyrannizing and
vague nostalgic emotion. Needless to add, no one
remembered that horrible nightmare when dawn came.
Yet, all day, it was as if a heavy burden fell onto
their souls. Someone, a sleepwalker, solved that
horrendous mystery. One night, just by chance, as
his unsure steps brought him to a beautiful hill,
imposing over the city, he noticed that the bronze
statue of Abraham Lincoln, who usually stood there,
was missing and the marble pedestal lit by the spotlights
seemed deserted. The “President”, that bronze
Abraham Lincoln was the strange night visitor!
The sleepwalker was paid a good sum of dollars.
When he was asked, he said his name was Judas.
His last name was Iscariot.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763734

Medusa

Shadow
Since I lost you, my beloved, my shadow doesn’t follow my steps, the cloud descends to annul the reason for your death, and I, Oedipus, stand before the sphinx. On the first days of November, you find the empty plaza with chairs searching for bodies and the pine trees sieve the stray sunray, sparrows call for a handout from the man with the buttoned coat, and I search my pocket for the lone toothpick.
— You still have to trim the junipers before the first frost.
The bitch hides her ugliness under her smooth makeup, mind in menstrual anxiety that underscores her sexual appetite as the jib yearns for the mistral’s kiss as I mingle with the people searching for my nonchalant dream, orphaned catamaran leans against the wooden dock and patiently waits for the next season as I feel the void of the world without you, my beloved.
—I must keep reminding you of the potatoes in the vegetable patch.
Finally, night comes when the gray owl sits on its throne on top of the spruce and recounts all its wisdom while paying attention to every little detail orated by the darkness.
—Are you listening to me?
I’m bereft of your body: lonely bed my prison and my destitute dream, hope for a sunlit smile from the young student across my window, and I shut my eyes when she smiles at her sexy idol in the observing mirror.
—I beg for an end to this travesty, but it doesn’t come

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763769