The stone above Bantry harbour has worn down to nearly nothing, but the old Irish can still be read if you press your fingers into the grooves. The fishermen’s wives used to recite it to their daughters, who forgot it. Only Maeve Drennan kept it, spoke it aloud each Sunday to no one: When the circle turns on the western shore, earth and sea will bear fire, and fire will know the air, and the old world will pass.
Maeve was eighty-six and talked to her hens. Nobody listened.
—
Aisling Drennan was restocking the supply room on a Tuesday in December when her nipples tightened under her scrubs and the goosebumps climbed her arms, the same feeling as those skinny dips in the cold sea she did in summer, except the ward was warm. She rubbed her skin, frowned, went back to counting.
Eight miles west of Mizen Head, Lieutenant James Morrow, US Navy, out of the Roosevelt on a carrier exercise, lost his starboard engine in a squall. The jet rolled hard before he could compensate, and at eight hundred feet in zero visibility he pulled the handle. The chute half-opened, and he hit the Atlantic hard enough to split his collarbone and tear his immersion suit at the shoulder. The life raft failed to separate. A trawler crew from Castletownbere, heading home early because the catch was poor, pulled him out blue-lipped and half-conscious. Sheer luck, since the carrier’s helicopters were grounded by the same squall. The crew got him below deck and radioed Valentia coastguard, who ran him to Bantry General from Schull pier because Cork was ninety minutes further and he didn’t have ninety minutes. Without the trawler, he’d have been dead inside the hour.
Two hours later, the ambulance pulled into Bantry. Aisling had fire-red hair and the tiredness of a twenty-two-year-old nurse working nights where nothing happened. Her mother was a farmer’s daughter from the hill above the village, and her father had been a fisherman on the Niamh. The boat came back one December evening six years ago without him, because the sea off West Cork does that.
They wheeled him into the ambulance bay trailing a smell of aviation fuel and brine. He was shaking under a foil blanket, flight suit cut open at the shoulder, face grey where the seawater had dried on it. He opened his eyes and looked at her, brown eyes steady even through the trembling, and she felt a clench low in her gut; she’d never once felt that looking at a patient.
“Where am I?”
“Bantry. West Cork. Ireland.”
He closed his eyes. “Okay.”
She held the IV while Dr. Crowley worked the collarbone back. Through the morphine, he still gripped the bed rail and breathed through his nose, jaw locked. When it was done, he said “Thank you” to her, not the doctor.
She checked on him at two. The ward was dark, just the green off the monitors and that drip from the sluice room tap nobody ever fixed. He was the only patient, awake, staring at the ceiling.
“Can’t sleep?”
“Every time I close my eyes, I’m back in the water.”
She pulled a chair to his bedside. She didn’t have to, but his shivering eased. Rain ticked against the window. They talked for an hour: the ejection, the seconds between the handle and the water, her night shifts. He asked her name and said it back, getting the vowels wrong. She corrected him, and he tried again, watching her mouth.
“Aisling.”
“Better.”
When she stood to leave, his fingers brushed hers on the bed rail. The touch was light, barely there, but neither of them pulled away, and for those two seconds she registered the warmth and roughness of his hand, the calluses on his palm against her fingertips. Then she stepped back and said goodnight and walked out, her hand tingling all the way down the corridor.
Next morning, she lay in bed and could not sleep. She slid her hand between her legs and thought about those calluses and came hard, face turned into the pillow.
—
The Navy came next day. A helicopter set down on the GAA pitch beside the hospital, rotors turning, and two medics wheeled him out on a stretcher while Aisling watched from the entrance, and then it banked south and was gone.
She finished her shift and that was that. He was gone, but the ember wasn’t.
Two weeks later, he walked into Murphy’s with his arm in a sling. Medical leave; he’d flown into Cork and taken the bus. He could have gone anywhere: Virginia, his mother’s porch. But he came to Bantry.
Aisling heard from two people before she saw him: Mary behind the post office counter and then Ciarán at the petrol station, who said it with a look that meant he thought she should know. She found James at the Quay next morning, sitting on the wall, watching the trawlers come in.
“Virginia not good enough for you?”
He looked up and smiled, and she realised she hadn’t seen him do that before; in the hospital he’d been grey and clenched and sweating. It made him look ten years younger. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”
She learned him in pieces: thirty, from the Shenandoah Valley, had wanted to fly since he was nine when his uncle took him up in a Cessna and he saw the shadow of the plane on the mountains below. Drank his coffee black and read paperbacks from the charity shop and didn’t talk unless she asked.
They had coffee in her flat above the chemist’s. Small place, cold in the mornings, condensation on the windows. He told her about the silence at forty thousand feet when you cut the throttle and coast, and she told him her father used to say the sea didn’t take people; it just forgot to give them back.
He looked at her when she said it and held her eyes longer than he needed to, and the ember in her gut flared.
That night, she counted the dates, because her father’s boat had come back empty on a Tuesday in December too, six years before the jet hit the same water.
Men in Bantry didn’t do this to her. She’d been on dates; few survived the first pint. Her mother had started mentioning cousins of friends from Cork. The only man who’d been inside her was a young fisherman the night she turned nineteen, both drunk on Paddy’s in the back of his van. She’d picked him because he had her father’s hands, and the whiskey made it seem like enough, but it wasn’t. She’d not been with anyone since. Three years. With James, the goosebumps had come back, and the fire in her belly hadn’t gone out since he’d walked into Murphy’s.
After that, she saw him most days. They walked the harbour road, and he asked about the names of the trawlers. He remembered everything: that she took milk in her tea but not in her coffee. One morning at the Quay, he handed her a cup, made right, without asking. His touch lingered on hers around the cup, which was the smallest thing, and it undid her.
He said the name of the boat that pulled him out. Niamh. Her cup stopped.
She offered to check the shoulder, a professional excuse. He sat on the edge of her bed because the flat had no chairs, and she unbuttoned his shirt and peeled it back. The bruise had faded to yellow at the edges, green underneath, and she pressed along the break, feeling for new bone, while the smell of wool and rain came off him.
“Healing well,” she said, and didn’t move away.
She followed the bruise down to his ribs. Not checking anymore, just tracing, and the muscle tensed under her hand when she reached the lowest edge near his hip where she felt his breathing catch.
She looked up. His face was right there, close enough she could count the flecks in his brown eyes, his breath on her lips.
She pulled back and pressed the shirt closed over his chest, patted it flat with her palm. “You’ll live.”
“Thank you, nurse.”
“Don’t call me nurse.”
“What should I call you?”
“Aisling. You learned that one already.”
He buttoned his shirt one-handed, slowly, and she turned to fill the kettle because watching him do it was worse than the unbuttoning. They talked about the weather. Neither mentioned how close they’d been.
She showed him the stone that afternoon, up the hill past Driscoll’s field where the gorse was yellow even in December. The grooves had worn shallow; you had to crouch and press your fingers in to read them. He did, tracing the letters with his thumb.
“What does it say?”
She gave him the Irish first, then the English. His hand stayed on the stone.
“What does it mean?”
“Nobody knows. My grandmother thought it was a prophecy.” She picked at a piece of lichen on the rock. “She was probably mad.”
He stood and took her hand, laced his fingers through hers, and they watched the sun drop until the harbour water went from grey to silver.
—
On New Year’s Eve, they were in the fishing hut below Maeve’s old cottage on the headland, the one Aisling’s mother never locked because nobody came down there in winter. Flagstone floor, a cot against the wall, a paraffin heater that rattled when it ran, one window facing the sea, and rain hammering the tin roof while the century ran out.
The wind picked up outside, pressing the tin, and her skin flushed hot. Her mother had met her father in this room, soil still under her fingernails from the hill, his clothes still wet from the boat. Earth and sea in a fishing hut, and nine months later, fire.
He kissed her first, standing in the middle of the room with the orange light from the heater on one side of his face, his good hand on the side of her neck, thumb against her jaw. She answered by catching his belt and pulling him closer.
She kissed him back harder, tasting the whiskey, and his hand found the gap between her jumper and her jeans, cold palm on warm skin. She leaned into it.
She unbuttoned his shirt, working around the sling. His chest was broad, lightly haired, still carrying the yellow-green ghost of the bruise from collarbone to ribs; she traced it, and he sucked air through his teeth.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
She pressed her hand flat over his chest where his heart was hammering; she could feel it through her palm. Then she kissed down his sternum, across his stomach, while his hand slid into her hair.
She pulled her jumper over her head and dropped it on the floor, unhooked her bra and let it fall, and stood straight without crossing her arms.
“Jesus,” he said.
“Very Catholic for a Navy pilot.”
“I’m from Virginia. We say it about everything.”
He cupped her breast, thumb circling her nipple, and she inhaled and bit her lip, forehead against his neck. The freckles ran from her throat down between her breasts, scattered everywhere. He did it again, slower, and the ache settled between her legs; then his lips replaced his thumb, warm and wet, tongue tracing where his finger had been, and she held the back of his head while it built.
“That prophecy,” she said into his hair. “On the stone.” His mouth moved to her neck, and she kept talking through it.
“Earth and sea will bear fire, and fire will know the air.” She pulled back, hands on his shoulders, to see his face. “My mother is the farmer’s daughter. My father was the fisherman.” She tugged a strand of her own hair. “I’m the fire.”
She touched his cheek. Took his hand and brought it up, closing his fist around a handful of copper.
“And you fell out of the sky.”
“You believe that?”
“My grandmother did. She said the circle would close and the old world would pass into the new.” Wind hit the tin wall, and the heater flame guttered. “It’s the millennium in three hours.”
His hand pressed the small of her back, pulled her against him. “What happens when the circle closes?”
“She never said.” She smiled. “Let’s find out.”
She unbuckled his belt, and he helped, shrugging the shirt off his good shoulder. Jeans next; she pushed them down, and he stepped out. Through his boxers, she felt him thicken against her palm, and he rocked into her grip.
“Cot,” she said.
“It’s going to break.”
“Probably.”
She pushed her own jeans down, underwear with them, and stood naked in front of him. Caught his waistband, pulled his boxers off, took him in her hand and stroked once, deliberate. He groaned, so she did it again, watching him clench while he held her hip.
“Lie down,” she said.
She helped him down, careful with his shoulder. When he lay back, she climbed over him and let her hair fall so it curtained them both, copper in the orange light, brushing his skin. He reached up and wound a fistful of it around his hand.
“I’ve wanted to do that since the hospital,” he said.
“I know.”
She leaned down and kissed him, all that copper still wound in his fist. He pulled, tilting her head back, and put his mouth on the hollow of her throat. The tug lit her up from scalp to tailbone.
She sat up and settled her weight forward, cunt against the length of him, not taking him in, just rocking.
He swore.
She rocked again, grinding the length of him, his cock pressing her clit with each roll until the warmth built and her ears buzzed. He caught her waist and tried to pull her down onto him, but she resisted.
“Not yet.”
“You’re killing me.”
“You survived the Atlantic.”
She rolled against him and let the slide of him set the rhythm. He noticed the freckles that scattered down her belly and traced them down between her breasts, his touch light and unhurried.
“Where do they stop?” he said.
“Keep going.”
He followed them lower to where they thinned at the crease of her thigh, then grazed her clit, pressed it against the shaft underneath, and she stuttered.
She leaned down, lips against his ear. “Tabhair dom é,” she said, thick Munster Irish she hadn’t spoken since her grandmother died. He didn’t understand a syllable, but her voice did the work, the dark vowels and the breath behind them, and she felt him twitch against her.
“What did you say?”
“I told you what I’m about to do to you.”
“Tell me in English.”
“No.” She bit his earlobe. “You’ll feel it instead.”
She reached between them and pressed her thumb against her clit while she moved over him, the accent thickening, English falling away, his name in her voice sounding different, softer at the start, longer, reshaped by her tongue. She came with her forehead pressed to him, hair across his face, thighs tight against his sides, shaking.
She didn’t wait for it to pass. She guided him to her and sank down, swollen from coming, tender, and the stretch made her gasp.
She stayed still with him inside her. His fingers dug into her hips hard enough to mark, and she felt him throb.
Then she moved, careful at first, until the angle was right and the bed creaked under them. Orange glow on the wall. Fire stoked by air.
The heater coughed twice and went out.
Dark. Just the grey square of the window and the rain on the tin roof.
“Heater’s gone,” he said.
“Don’t care.”
She kept moving. In the dark, the sea was louder, hitting the rocks outside, and it mixed with the cot scraping the floor and the sounds they were making until she lost track of which was which.
She rode him harder, and he grabbed her arse, pulling her down with each stroke while she braced against him and bore forward because the angle hit a spot still raw and swollen, and she chased it.
He sat up, wincing, and pulled her against him. His mouth found her nipple in the dark, and she grabbed his hair and held him there.
“Ansin,” she said. “Ansin díreach. Ná stop.” He couldn’t understand the words. She was flush against him, and her voice broke on the last one.
“I’m close,” she said. English again. Barely.
“I know.” He kissed the sweat below her ear, and his teeth caught her neck. “Let go.”
She came with her face in his neck and her teeth against his skin and him so deep it ached. This one was slower, rolling through her while she bucked against him and he held her through it, his arm tight around her waist, his face pressed into her red hair.
He lasted four more strokes, then pressed deep and came inside her while the cot groaned, his arm locked around her and held.
He was shivering against her. She wasn’t.
“How are you warm?” he said.
“I’m the fire. You stoked it.”
She pulled him closer and held him there until the shivering stopped. She relit the heater and climbed back into bed beside him.
The wind dropped, and the sea came back, turning against the rocks below the hut.
They lay on the narrow bed, her head on his good shoulder, and the rain had eased. Through the window nothing but the black sea. No fireworks out here.
Midnight came. They didn’t hear it.
