"Braile of Brocade" (2012, 4 pages)
March 1 to March 31
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Mary Henly
Kilkenny
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Someone once asked me "what I get out of doing Irish Short Story Month". One of the biggest things is discovering exciting new to me writers near the start of their writing career who I can watch develop. Mary Healy of Kilkenny, Ireland certainly falls into this category. Yesterday I read two of her short stories twice and greatly enjoyed them both. (I will provide a link at the end of the post to "Cookoo Money" and I have been given permission to publish "Braille of Brocade" and will do so soon.) Both of her stories are in a way about strays, in one case a dog and the other a woman. They are about different forms of love, about nurturing, about the different kind of bonds one can form, about the compromises people sometimes make that change their lives forever.
"Cuckoo Money"
"A fine catch, a great farm of land.' Granny went on, pausing in her knitting and fixing her eye on mother.
'And he doesn't drink.' She jabbed her needles back into the wool 'There's a bit of breeding behind him. He's after buying Cleere's place, they said the bidding was fierce but Doran got it in the end. The Doran's of this world get what they want.'
'Not always.' My mother said quietly. 'Not always.'"
"A fine catch, a great farm of land.' Granny went on, pausing in her knitting and fixing her eye on mother.
'And he doesn't drink.' She jabbed her needles back into the wool 'There's a bit of breeding behind him. He's after buying Cleere's place, they said the bidding was fierce but Doran got it in the end. The Doran's of this world get what they want.'
'Not always.' My mother said quietly. 'Not always.'"
"Cuckoo Money" was the runner up in the 2012 RTE Guide/Penquin Ireland Short Story Contest. (I will provide you with a link to this story.) The story is set in rural Ireland. There are six main presences in the story. The narrator is a boy, looks like in late teens, his mother and his father plus his granny who lives with them. In a nearby farm we have Doran, a wealthy man who once courted the boy's mother but she spurned him, a fact granny likes to throw in her face as you can see in the painfully real lines above..He never married. There is also a dog named Jess who the boy adopts as a stray. As the story opens Jess is being introduced to the family. The grandmother says "just what we need another mouth to feed" but the father tells granny to leave the boy and his dog alone. Jess has a home. The descriptions of the boy and Jess roaming the countryside are beautiful and very moving though it is coupled with a very sad event. I will quote enough so you can get the feel of the wonderful prose of Healy:
"I caught Jess up in my arms and hugged her. That summer we travelled the fields, explored under the blackthorn tree where the river ran quick and quiet over small smooth pebbles. Often we lay on our bellies and watched shoals of brickeens hide in the deep water. Everything changed around that time. Mam spent a lot of time in bed.Summer melted into a warm autumn and tar bubbled on the road. The apple trees in the orchard dropped heavy fruit onto the burnt grass. Jess and I went for the cows each day trailing along the dusty paths back to the dairy. I went on the bus to a new school, a small boy in a big place. Coming home one day I found the animals being loaded into a truck."
One of the main sources of revenue on the farm was from the cows. Sadly they have been diagnosed as having bovine TB so they must be destroyed. The mother begins to get sick, her feet swell up. Now several interrelated things begin to happen. The mother has to go to a doctor in the city and that takes the money granny had saved for her funeral. The doctor wants to the mother to spend a few days in the hospital. Granny tells the man he needs to ask Doran for the money, he has to swallow his pride or risk losing his wife. There turns out to be another solution. I will leave it untold.
I really liked the ending of this story. It combined the real life harshness of life in rural Ireland (or most anywhere) with the sheer inventiveness of the father to solve the problem while secretly getting the better of his rival, Doran. There are strong family feelings in this story without being overly cloying. In just a few pages it brings a whole family vividly to life. Dog lovers will be pained at the end but I bet it works out just fine for Jess. I am very glad I had to the opportunity to read this story.
"Cuckoo Money" can be read here.
"Braile of Brocade"
"That first day as he watched her, he wondered what few sentences summed up the damaged life he was about to take on. She was hunched over the box of tacks, hair as black and shiny as ebony, shading eyes that were dark and deep in an elfin face. She wore coloured knits on her thin legs, scarves wrapped, turban like, around her head. Her pale skin was darted with tiny studs of angry jewels. Over the next few weeks he was continuously surprised at the various ways her flesh was mutilated, as if some vicious being had possessively stamped itself all over her body. A bright green snake licked its way up over the waistband of her trousers, its lewd forked tongue creeping up to where the skin was delicate, translucent. A pierced heart shape tattooed the fine skin of her ankle."
Like "Cuckoo Money" there is an act of kindness, expecting little in return that is at the heart of this very fascinating story. In "Cuckoo Money" the stray is the dog Jess, here it is a badly damaged woman in need of some time to recenter herself. The setting is a half-way house of some sorts. Maybe the woman was sent there by the courts as a last resort. Healy does a marvelous job of telling is just the bare minimum we need to know. It take a very talented writer to know where to stop. There are only two people in this story, the woman and the man who directs the center. It is not made totally clear what the place is or why she is there but they seem to concentrate on making furniture, maybe they are teaching people a trade. As Mary Healy has graciously given me permission to publish story (coming soon) I will just quote a bit so you can feel the power of her prose:
"He knew she was connected to the vision of the creator, sensually, tactilely, visually entranced. The language of one artist to another.
She stood there lost in the experience and when she opened her eyes they were tragic, mystical. He saw a small smile play on her lips and he nodded, turning back to his polish, abashed at her naked vulnerability. There was purity in her that life had not destroyed; it was carefully hidden, protected, but there."
I really liked the ending of this story. It combined the real life harshness of life in rural Ireland (or most anywhere) with the sheer inventiveness of the father to solve the problem while secretly getting the better of his rival, Doran. There are strong family feelings in this story without being overly cloying. In just a few pages it brings a whole family vividly to life. Dog lovers will be pained at the end but I bet it works out just fine for Jess. I am very glad I had to the opportunity to read this story.
"Cuckoo Money" can be read here.
"Braile of Brocade"
"That first day as he watched her, he wondered what few sentences summed up the damaged life he was about to take on. She was hunched over the box of tacks, hair as black and shiny as ebony, shading eyes that were dark and deep in an elfin face. She wore coloured knits on her thin legs, scarves wrapped, turban like, around her head. Her pale skin was darted with tiny studs of angry jewels. Over the next few weeks he was continuously surprised at the various ways her flesh was mutilated, as if some vicious being had possessively stamped itself all over her body. A bright green snake licked its way up over the waistband of her trousers, its lewd forked tongue creeping up to where the skin was delicate, translucent. A pierced heart shape tattooed the fine skin of her ankle."
Like "Cuckoo Money" there is an act of kindness, expecting little in return that is at the heart of this very fascinating story. In "Cuckoo Money" the stray is the dog Jess, here it is a badly damaged woman in need of some time to recenter herself. The setting is a half-way house of some sorts. Maybe the woman was sent there by the courts as a last resort. Healy does a marvelous job of telling is just the bare minimum we need to know. It take a very talented writer to know where to stop. There are only two people in this story, the woman and the man who directs the center. It is not made totally clear what the place is or why she is there but they seem to concentrate on making furniture, maybe they are teaching people a trade. As Mary Healy has graciously given me permission to publish story (coming soon) I will just quote a bit so you can feel the power of her prose:
"He knew she was connected to the vision of the creator, sensually, tactilely, visually entranced. The language of one artist to another.
She stood there lost in the experience and when she opened her eyes they were tragic, mystical. He saw a small smile play on her lips and he nodded, turning back to his polish, abashed at her naked vulnerability. There was purity in her that life had not destroyed; it was carefully hidden, protected, but there."
Author Data
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Mary Healy, a Kilkenny based writer is a graduate of NUI Maynooth course of Creative Writing for Publication. Her work has been published in several anthologies and broadcast on radio. Her work also won prizes in The Irish Writers Centre in 2011 and 2012, and features in their archives. This year she won the UCD Masters Anthology Competition 2012 and will be published in their collection of short stories in December 2012. ‘New Trick with Matches.’ She was highly commended on the short list in the Bryan MacMahon Competition in Listowel Irish Writers week and in the top ten of RTE Guide Penguin/Eason’s Short Story Competition.
Her blog is a good source of information about Irish literary contests as well as a fascinating work in itself.
I look forward one of these days to posting on a collection of short stories by Mary Healy. I greatly enjoyed both of these stories.
She has kindly agreed to so a Q and A Session for ISSM3 so please look for it soon.
Mel u
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