A Christmas table groaning beneath the weight of the biggest turkey you have ever seen. All the trimmings as well. Someone singing something happy in the kitchen. The doorbell rings. The loveliest tree sits proudly in the corner bedecked in ribbons and balls. And the smell. Like everything wonderful all together. Happy faces on everyone here. Beery hugs and the rip of paper fills the air. Neighbours visiting and then everyone sits down to eat. All around the table. Mum and Dad. Aunties and Uncles. Sons. Daughters. Cousins. Pulling crackers and laughing. The doorbell rings once more. The front door opens. Footsteps in the hallway.

A small child with a broken nose stands in the doorway screaming.

When we are confronted by an insect, our natural reaction is to use our hands to wipe and swipe and flick and push away and squash the thing annoying you. Or hit it with a rolled-up newspaper. At the very least we would wave something in a bid to get the insect to go and bother someone else.

A single fly, perhaps?

A cloud of midges?

An ant in your lunchbox?

A wasp attracted to your fizzy drink?

A descending ocean of cockroaches?

Bara Cailín Chapter 4

Advanced Examination Paper

Instructions for Candidates

Write your answers to the following questions in the space provided.

All questions carry equal marks.

1. What would it feel like to have a billion billion cockroaches the size of pebbles fall from the ceiling of a cave beneath a mountain and land upon your head?

2. What would it sound like?

3. How would you feel if it happened to you?

4. Where are the words?

Click. Spark. Glow. Blow. Blow. Glow. Dark. Click. Spark. Glow. Blow. Again. Gentle. Glow. Dark. Click. Spark. Glow. Blow. Longer. Still gentle. Glow. Blow. Longer still. Blow. Glow. Dark. Click. Spark. Glow. Blow. Gentle. Glow. Blow. Glow. Blow. Flame. Blow. Flame. Blow. Longer. Gentle. Flame. Flames. Red. Glow. Blow. Smile. Blow. Flame. Catch. Spread. Blow. Spread. Red. Light. Glow. Flame. Lick. Curl. Light. More light. Red. Orange. Crack. Smoke. Spread. Lick. Curl. Red. Orange.

Fire.

Picture the version of this story that is the film and here the editor cuts from an extreme close shot of the flint’s flicker to an impossible wide shot of the space as the camera is held high on high and looking down as if from a celestial point of view.

There is no next cut and this wide shot remains in place. We begin to read the darkness as an apocalyptic one, ceremental in the way in which it covers everything with its cling from the grave.

We

have all panicked. All of us. Trying to stay calm. Collected. Unaffected. Trying not to let something bother us. But the bothersome normally beats us. And begins to transform the rhythm of our lives and as we fail to stay calm everything about our experience begins to accelerate and what we thought was once sensible and normal  now becomes none of these things and our breaths get shorter and we find that thing take longer and we try harder and they take longer again and the more we try the more we don’t succeed and the more we don’t succeed the faster the feeling of panic fills up and begins to overflow now spilling into our ears and making it to hard to hear and our eyes and we struggle to focus and our mouths and we find breathing hard and our limbs so the light becomes heavy becomes impossible and our finely boned and jointed hands and feet and legs eventually behave like the many splintered branches on

a tiny broken tree.

The Four of TheFive now appears to the world as a new symbol simultaneously added to every  language in the world both lost and known spoken and no longer heard the strikethrough lemniscate signalling not-only-infinity-but-final-end-to-come-also as represented here  and also deliberately ensuring that every sentence ever typed on every screen of every shape and size across the globe from now on is struck through as both a default matter of course and bothersome nuisance as well as a cruel and wearying commentary on the encroaching erasure of civilisation itself.

#kidlit #scifi #horror #mystery Bara Cailín – Daily adventures published at http://t.co/KxyB9BNVIN TRAILER https://t.co/79PM3B1STT

— Barnaby Taylor (@BTDublin2012) September 13, 2015

There is as much inevitability attached to happy events as there is to those more catastrophic and destructive in their nature and so it came to pass that on the ninth day of his imprisonment Mac found himself, Iseult and Gilly, as usual, watching as another lorry reversed into the courtyard and the Pilers did their job. With the lorry emptied it was now the Rippers turn to tear the pile apart and prepare it for the Burners.

With a show of gusto intended only for the many louts watching them like beady birds and a dizziness induced by the meagre rations, Mac threw himself at the pile and began to rip off covers and blank pages.

‘That’s right,’ shouted the closest lout. ‘Get stuck in, Granddad. There will be no breakfast until this lot is no more.’ The lout waved his whip in the air.

Mac was starving hungry and so he hurriedly grabbed a pile of papers and seeing nothing seemingly printed on the top he threw the pile onto the wheelbarrow without even a second look. A Burner pushed the wheelbarrow to the closest bonfire and tipped the paper onto the flames.

The words Mac an Bhaird’s Miscellanea burned briefly and brightly before the pile of paper joined all the ash.

Others were far less inclined to take part and try as they may by the end of that day Mac and Gilly hadn’t managed to recruit anybody else.

Most people agreed in principle with the idea and said that they would do what they thought they could get away with but so ferocious were the boiler-suited louts and so dismal were the conditions that it was all that most people could do to stop themselves from getting a beating.

Anyone caught doing anything seemingly untoward would have their food and blankets and any other possessions they might have managed to acquire thrown onto the nearest bonfire. Anyone who tried to intervene in any way would have the same thing happen to him or her.

If at the end of another gruelling day of hard labour you were presented with a curling cheese and coleslaw sandwich and a small bottle of cheap cola I am pretty sure you would much rather eat what you were given than spend the night shivering in the dark with no food and no blanket.

Over the days that followed Mac and Gilly started to spread the word of their (partial) rebellion to the other people forced to work in the courtyard.

Some, like Doctor Iseult Ó Buachalla, world-renowned author of The Tallowcentric Tradition: History, Uses and Abuses of Ecclesiastical Tapers, Votives and Veladoras (who last time we met had been stuck sobbing on Mac’s bus for three days) didn’t take much persuading.

‘I wasn’t at my best the last time you saw me,’ she said to Mac.

‘None of us were, Doctor Ó Buachalla,’ smiled Mac.

‘No-one will see me like that again,’ she continued. ‘I will make damned sure of that.’

‘I’m sure you will, Iseult,’ Mac replied. ‘I’m sure you will.’