Homecoming
by Siobhán Daffy
Martin Dunne, Night Driving, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
HOMECOMING
Siobhán Daffy | AUG 2023 | Issue 26
The flight landed at 11 p.m. In my haste, I parked in the wrong area, propped a scrawled note on the dash to avoid a fine. The airport was bustling with life and colour, as if it were the middle of the day. I spotted Trina right away and pulled her close. We navigated our exit through the row of taxis, our grief a hidden thing amongst the clatter of suitcases.
I don’t know how to describe the journey except to say that the road went on and on. And even though we longed to get there, at the same time, we longed never to arrive at all. To wind the clock back so that everything spun in reverse: the plane un-landing, my car reversing back up the road, the phones going silent, the shock evaporating into air. Just another day where nothing remarkable happened.
We stared out the windscreen into the black night and began to unpick the days and weeks before. She was planting bulbs for the spring, Trina said. She was planning a trip.
The headlights picked out numbered exits. An occasional car zoomed past, red tail lights fading into darkness. We trailed into childhood memories, the antics we got up to as a gang of cousins running wild in the fields. The time we pretended to be visitors from New York, throwing out phrases poached from TV, though any local could identify us by our freckled faces. I heard how Trina’s kids were growing up speaking Catalan and Spanish. The house in Girona was once a flower shop. In the back, she explained, was a room with a potter’s wheel where she shaped mugs from lumps of clay.
I watched the land unspool and thought about meteorites, the fleeting beauty of a shooting star. How strange that some lives barely last an hour, while others stretch one hundred years. We were never going to know whether it was the meds that caused it, or whether her sister would have taken her own life either way. Every question led to a hundred more, all of them unanswerable now.
It was 1 a.m. by the time we turned off the motorway onto the winding country road. After a while, we pulled in by a farm gate to pee. We squatted in the grass, the dew wet on our bare thighs. Our puffs of breath hung in the air, the quiet loud in our ears. A few stars were scattered over dark fields. A herd of cattle huddled by a blackthorn thicket, their hooves shuffling in the mud. In the distance the faint hum of traffic. We pulled up our pants and climbed back in the van, shaking with the cold, and the anticipation. Picturing her mother waiting in the house, watching the clock. The kettle coming to a boil. The tea bags soaking. The moment we walk through the door.
Siobhán Daffy is an author and poet based in the Dublin mountains, Ireland. Her poetry has been published in many journals. Her CD Horse’s Hooves, a spoken poetry & music collaboration, is available on Bandcamp. Her children’s novel No Ordinary Joe was published with Little Island Books in 2021. She is currently working on her second novel. Siobhán has worked as a facilitator in the creative arts for over twenty years and currently runs a natural health practice focused on women’s wellbeing.