The Serendipity of Flightless Things

by Fiadhnait Moser

  Nuala batted a hand and laughed. “That old one again? I must’a spent more of me life tellin’ that tale than brushing my teeth.”

  “Oh, come on, please,” groaned a porky man, and a tidal wave of begging washed over the pub.

  Nuala frowned wryly at me before complying. “Very well.” She perched her feet on the stool’s ledge and leaned in close. “Once, in a world weary with troubles, there yawned a village of little remark—except, of course, for the ravine that gurgled at the edge of the wood. These waters were pricked by magic, reflecting not one’s face, but one’s true soul. Two sisters bathed in this ravine often, and the water reflected upon them truly—the elder, graced with eyes blue as serenity, and the younger, with hair yellow as joy. Their love for each other was simple, yet pure. A stronger sisterhood, not a sleuth could find. That was, until—”

  The door flung open. The racks of glasses behind the bar shivered as a gust of wind billowed through the pub. A figure, big-footed boots and breathless, stood square in the doorway.

  “Good heavens,” said Mr. McCann, an empty glass falling from his hands onto the old oak bar. “Is it—”

  But before he could finish his sentence, my voice crackled at the back of my throat, “… Da?”

  Chapter 6

  DA HAD A SCAR BY HIS UPPER LIP that winked when he smiled. He had one by his eyebrow, too, that hadn’t been there the last time I’d seen him three months ago. “Baby girl,” was what he said, beaming. He barreled through the crowd, lifted me from the barstool, and swung me thrice around in a flying waltz.

  A few older ladies cooed, and Ciara Cassidy and her friends snickered. But right then, right then, it was just me and Da, and to me, Da’s smile was a lighthouse, and I a fishing boat wandering the sea.

  As my toes brushed the ground, however, Da’s smile faded.

  “What is it?” I said.

  Da looked through me, and I turned, following his gaze.

  “Darcy Brannon,” he whispered.

  Darcy hopped off her barstool, the click of her dance shoes echoing around the pub. “Yes?”

  Darcy’s nanny, Miss Hurley, bustled through the crowd to Darcy’s side and gazed anxiously up at Da. Da pulled off his military hat and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  My stomach plummeted. Miss Hurley’s eyes widened and Mr. McCann’s freshly poured copper drink teetered in his hand, then splashed onto the floor. Every eye turned to Darcy. It was as if everyone in the pub knew except for her.

  “But, Mr. O’Sé,” said Darcy, “I don’t understand. You haven’t done nothin’.”

  And then came the voice. That whiny, nose-stuck-in-other-people’s-business, jumping-spider voice. It slithered soft and slowly into my and Darcy’s ears, a harsh whisper like that of a rattlesnake’s tail. Snakes had been banned from Ireland from Saint Patrick thousands of years ago. I wondered how Sojourn managed to get in. “He’s dead, dummy. Dead, dead, dead. Dead as a doornail, dead as your Christmas tree in July. I won’t say I told you so, but—”

  “Shut up.”

  All eyes blinked to me. Goose bumps dappled my arms, and I slunk backward, wishing again I could be a tortoise.

  Sojourn appeared in the corner of my vision, flanked by Ciara and her friends. How Sojourn had already weaseled his way into Ciara’s crew was beyond me. And as I shrunk back farther, Sojourn tipped up his chin and shrugged. “Someone had to tell her.”

  I huffed and shook my head, then surprising myself, I spat, “You’re pathetic, you know that?”

  I grabbed Darcy’s wrist and yanked her through the crowd. She limped faintly along as if her limbs were filled with helium. We stumbled into a back room cluttered with cardboard boxes smelling of stale whisky. Another door behind a large box had a sign hanging lopsided by a single nail atop it, reading EXIT.

  “Just through here,” I muttered, and pulled Darcy along outside.

  The door led to an alleyway where the walls were dim and the moon was bright. Bright and big and hollow—a mirror of Darcy’s eyes.

  I forgot I owned a tongue as I struggled for words. But then Darcy seemed to remember her own tongue. And she screamed. The night held its breath. Darcy slumped down against the pub wall, her fingers slipping from mine.

  And all I could do was stare. Because looking at her was like realizing for the first time that wishing stones don’t work on you. That what you want has nothing to do with what you deserve, and what you deserve has nothing to do with what you get. Because happily-ever-afters … they didn’t exist for kids like us. I was a storyteller, and I knew that happily-ever-afters didn’t exist in golden castles, and they didn’t exist in enchanted forests. They didn’t exist in life, and they didn’t exist in death, and they sure didn’t exist in stories. Happily-ever-afters took flight in dreams. And me and Darcy, we had impossible dreams. Wingless dreams. So really, we didn’t even stand a chance.

  And so I cried. I cried and cried and cried, and I didn’t even know it before I was slumped next to Darcy, whispering, “Shh, shh, shh …”

  When her sobs quieted, I propped my head on my hand and tried: “He was a good man. Kind and brave—really brave, like—like fire-breathing-gryphadragon brave.”

  That would normally have made Darcy giggle, but instead, tears pooled in her eyes. I fluttered my hands, but my fingers were like butterflies trying to hold back tidal waves. “No—no, that’s not what I meant.” I should have just kept quiet. “He’s more like a—a Pegasus?”

  “How does it end?” Darcy’s voice caught me off guard. It sounded different. Bad different. She used to sound little, and now she sounded old as me, maybe even older.

  “How does what end?” I whispered.

  Darcy sniffed away a lingering sob. “Your story. The Children of Lir.”

  “Oh,” I said, struggling to remember where we left off. But then I decided it didn’t really matter where. Anywhere you started, it ended up in the same place. “The children turn to swans,” I said.

  Darcy blinked. “That’s it?”

  I patted my knee, and Darcy crawled onto it. I wrapped an arm around her and nodded. “The children’s stepmother tried to murder them, and they turned to swans—all except Darcy. Darcy grew and grew, and one day in a willow glade, she heard the tale of the Children of Lir. And ever since, she spent her days searching for her long-lost half-siblings-turned-swans.”

  Darcy and I sat in silence for some time, Darcy staring up at me, still waiting for another piece of story. Finally, as the moon tiptoed over the edge of the alley walls, Darcy asked, “Well—well does she ever find ’em?”

  I leaned close to Darcy’s ear and whispered, “Some say she still roams these lands. That the story’s still happenin’ to this very day. Others, well, they say her search has just only begun. But not a storyteller in Ireland will say she’s found them. It matters not, though, because that is where the story leaves us. There is not a whisper more.”

  “Well, I like it,” decided Darcy. “Even if it is sad.”

  “Then it’s yours.”

  Darcy peered up, and I added, “You’re the first person I ever told that story. So that makes you the story’s keeper. Like how I keep Nuala’s stories. You know, one day, I’m gonna be a storyteller—a real one—just like her.”

  “Oh,” said Darcy. “So who’s gonna be your story keeper? For the rest o’ the stories, I mean.”

  I rested my head back against the wall and thought. My whole life all I had wanted was brothers and sisters, and a mother, and a father who stuck around, or even just some friends, just like the girl in “The Children of Lir”—that and the swans, of course. And somehow, the two dreams were entwined. It wasn’t like I believed the swans were my siblings or anything. It was just like … like if I found the swans, perhaps my dream of finding a real family of my own wouldn’t seem so impossible. Perhaps I wouldn’t feel so hopeless. Or so alone. And I knew I wasn’t really alone—I had Nuala and Grandpa Oliver, even if he was a tree, and the hawthorn leaves and the sheep and the
ants and Inis Eala and Da when he showed up. But still, more often than not, I, as sure as rain over Dublin, felt alone.

  Except for Darcy. Except for Darcy, except for Darcy, except for Darcy.

  I shook away the thoughts and said, “Here.” I reached behind my neck and unlatched the clasp of the silver locket. “This is yours for the night. You need it more than me.”

  “Your locket?”

  I nodded. “That way, you can keep me right here.” I laid a finger on Darcy’s chest, felt her heart thump-a-thump-a-thump. “You shouldn’t have to be lonely tonight.”

  I fixed the locket around Darcy’s neck as she said, “Oh.”

  “Something wrong?” I said.

  “Well, it’s just … what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You shouldn’t have to be lonely, either.”

  “I’m not—”

  “I’m not stupid. Besides, it’s only fair you get something too. You need …” Darcy pulled her foot to her nose and leaned in close, fiddling with something on the side of her dance shoe. When at last she tore it from the leather, she held up the tiny, glittering object to the moon and announced, “This.”

  I smiled wryly. “A shoe buckle.”

  “No,” said Darcy, placing the silver buckle in my palm. “It’s a wing. Miss Eileen says that’s how we leap so high when we do our jumps at dance. Tie it to your ankle, you’ll see,” and Darcy unlaced a shoelace from her shoe, then looped it through the buckle and around my ankle.

  I grinned and flourished my ankle so the starlight caught the metal. “How do I look?”

  Darcy, puffy-faced and red-eyed, beamed. “You’re perfect.”

  Chapter 7

  DA SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE hunched over a cup of chamomile tea. The table looked doll-sized compared to his long legs, and the little wooden chair wobbled as he stirred his spoon. Nuala rattled around the pots and pans as Da waved her off. “I’m fine, Missus,” said Da. He never got around to calling Nuala Nuala after he married Ma, but Mrs. O’Dálaigh was simply too long, so Missus worked just fine. “No need to fuss—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” admonished Nuala, pouring a cup of oats into a rusted pot. The blue fire below the stovetop whizzed to life as she added, “Your stomach’s probably shrunk to the size of a pea with all they feed you in the army.”

  “It’s Belfast, Missus, not Vietnam,” said Da. “We feed ourselves, and I get food plenty. If you want to pity someone, pity ’em soldiers down in the elephant grass and the orange gas. If you’ve got to pity someone close by, pity the young. Pity the church. Pity the land. Pity the sad and pity the angry. But me? Don’t pity me.”

  I watched it all from the reflection of the window. My elbows tingled with the draft creeping under the ledge. I watched a spider tiptoe along the edge of the moon. Da’s bravery was like a wing I wanted to borrow. Everything I’d always wanted.

  Nuala sashayed across the kitchen with a steaming ceramic bowl. “Well, pity party aside, you’re eating your porridge.” She set it down before Da, then ruffled up his bangs and added, “Never mind your stomach, anyway—when was the last time you got a haircut? I’ll do it in the mornin’, now eat up.”

  Da shook his head, but didn’t argue. He sprinkled five spoons of sugar and poured half a glass of cream into his porridge, then sighed, “Mmm. Like biscuits in a bowl.”

  “You’re so gross, Da,” I said, but my lips curled up.

  “Ah, so she does speak,” said Da. “Does she laugh too?” And he stuck out his porridge-speckled tongue.

  “Lorcan,” scolded Nuala.

  I grimaced into the window as Da sheepishly stuck back in his tongue.

  After he swallowed, Da squinted his eyes into his window reflection as if trying to stare into mine. “Pack’s gettin’ pretty heavy?” That was what Da said when he knew I was getting sad from other people’s sadness. He said it because of a story I once told him (that Nuala once told me) about a peddler’s mule that carried so many saucepans and whisky bottles and umbrellas and fiddles and teakettles and garden rakes upon his back that a wee straw buckled his knees and sent him tumbling into a valley.

  Da put down his spoon and his tone grew serious as he said, “You don’t have to carry everyone’s sadness.”

  Oh, but I do, I thought. At least, I had to carry Darcy’s.

  Nuala swished over to me and kissed the top of my head. “If nothin’ else is sure in this world, it’s that our girl’s got Aobh’s heart.”

  The sound of my mother’s name trilled against my heart like fingers on harp strings. Nuala pronounced it like eve, and that was how I imagined her, even though I’d only met her once, and I was only zero days old then. My mother was an eve: she was the magic that comes before Christmas morning, the chills that scuttle up your spine when something magnificent is just about to happen, the breathlessness that crashes upon you on the edge of wonder.

  Da grinned. “Her heart, and her eyes, and her nose, and her toes, and her … tickle spot!” With a clatter of the too-small table, Da lunged, Nuala cupping his porridge bowl, and before I could quick-hop away, Da was at my ribs. I gasped with laughter and balled up like a roly-poly bug on the wood floor.

  “Stop, stop!” I giggled, and Da retreated, sitting crisscross on the floor opposite me. His scar smile stretched wider than I’d seen it stretch in a long time. Even Nuala muffled a laugh.

  It was one of those moments that made me believe, truly, that all was beautiful and nothing could hurt us. Because even though joy wasn’t permanent, sadness wasn’t either, which was one of those sneaky, slippery secrets of the world. And I felt better for knowing it.

  I wrangled in my laughter, but before my smile could fall any lower, Da said, “Are you hungry? You, baby girl, look absolutely famished.”

  “Actually, I’m fi—”

  Da reached into his pocket and whipped out a little bag of sunshine-yellow candies.

  “Lemon drops!” I grabbed the bag, tore it open, then handed out a round of lemon drops to Da, Nuala, and myself. As I popped mine into my mouth, the sour whizzed around my mouth, zinging off my tongue to the back of my throat … and then the sweet set in, buttery soft.

  This, I thought, would be a perfect time to ask what had been pecking at the back of my brain all evening. Da was happy. Nuala was happy. Da was happier—my best bet. “Da?” I said. “You know who could really use a lemon drop tonight?”

  “Who?” said Da.

  “Darcy Brannon.” I twirled my finger ’round a hole in my sleeve. “Can I sleep over at her house tonight? Miss Hurley wouldn’t mind—I’m sure of it. Please?”

  Simultaneously, Da said, “Sure,” and Nuala said, “No.” They exchanged glances. Nuala frowned. “No,” she repeated, bulging her eyes out at Da.

  “Of course she can go,” exclaimed Da, getting to his feet. I got to mine as well and slunk to the table, lowered into the wobbly chair.

  “Lorcan, you don’t understand—”

  “Is this how you’re handling Finn’s upbringing? Locking her up like some sunlight-deprived damsel?”

  “I’m doing what I’ve done for the past eleven years, Lorcan—keeping her safe.”

  “Twelve years,” whispered Da. “And don’t you forget about the lost ones I cared for till they went missing under your care, Nuala.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what Da was on about, and he muttered, “Sorry. Shouldn’t ’a brought that up.”

  Nuala sighed and rubbed her neck, but Da’s mouth crinkled with suppressed anger. “Finn is twelve years of age today, which is plenty old enough to spend a night away. And besides that, she’s my daughter.”

  The wrinkles on Nuala’s forehead deepened. “Lorcan, I promise you, I would allow her out any night except—”

  “Her birthday? The night she should be off making prank phone calls and playing spin the bottle and stuffing herself with cake?”

  I pretended to be intently fascinated with Da’s sugar porridge and began to stir the spoon.
When Nuala spoke, her voice was cold as the Skellig Islands in December. “She’s twelve, not twenty-two—and she likes pie, not cake. And she has celebrated. She celebrated half the evening at McCann’s until someone showed up—”

  I shifted around in my chair and peered up at Nuala and Da, stomach squirming. “It’s okay, I, er—I don’t need to g—”

  Da raised a hand and fired, “No, Finn, you’re going.” He turned back to Nuala, eyes narrowed. “My daughter, my rules. End of discussion.”

  Nuala huffed. “Have it your way, then. But when she’s not around come mornin’, this is on you—”

  “Oh, don’t be so melodramatic—”

  “And once you run off again to Belfast, just know that I will be the one who weeps. Because Finnuala is more a daughter to me than she will ever be to you.”

  “Nuala—” I started, but Nuala ignored me. Wouldn’t even look at me. And she strode past Da straight out the kitchen. Da took after her, bumping his head on a low-hanging pot, bellowing, “I’ll die before somethin’ happens to Finn—” but Nuala had slammed her bedroom door.

  Da turned back, lips pursed and fists clenched.

  “Da?” I whispered.

  He wouldn’t look at me, either. Something like a diamond glittered beside his eye. “Go pack, Finn.” His voice cracked on my name.

  “It’s okay if—if I don’t go—”

  He marched over to where I sat at the table, swiped up the porridge and tossed it into the sink. “For God’s sake, Finn, go pack your toothbrush and pj’s and go to your friend’s house.” He leaned over the sink, head bowed.

  I stood and made way for the staircase, but before I could scurry up, Da spoke. Didn’t turn, didn’t look, but spoke. “You are my daughter, baby girl. And I think about you always.”

  Chapter 8

  GUILT TUGGED AT MY FINGERS, prying them off my hairbrush; I dropped it into my yellow duffel bag. I tossed my toothbrush, a couple of mismatched socks, a nightgown, and a pillow in too, and then I opened up my periwinkle pouch. Both the snorkel and my field journal flopped onto my quilt. My heart stuttered. This is it. This could be my only chance …