I’m six and will be seven. Seven is big. Seven means I’ll be out of being a child and into being a girl and aiming to be a woman. I’m to put away the stories about the monsters that are not real and to hear about the others. They’ve got worse as I got older; heroes are caught, turned, burned, throttled, they die of hunger and cold. Children same as me. Maeve listens approvingly. Mam mops up my tears and comes to me if I scream at night, but she doesn’t stop telling them.
They’re easier to talk about in the day; we are gardening when I tell the two of them I had nightmares again, about monsters.
“Ghosts and giants are just stories,” Maeve says, not stopping what she’s doing to look at me.
“But skrake are real?”
“Real enough to kill you dead,” Maeve says. She has shown me her scars: her ear gone clean from her head, the long red-and-white welts on her back.
“But there’re none on the island,” Mam reminds me. She stands and stretches out her back, putting one hand against the sun.
Home always feels safe; death seems so far away when Slanbeg is full of life, when everything grows so fast and desperate, when the weeds need to be attended constantly. I look away from Mam and let my fingers sink back into the cool earth.
“How many people are there in the world?” It’s questions like these I’ve been thinking about more and more, and it’s easier to talk when we’re all busy with our hands in the muck and feeling light with each other.
Nobody says anything.
“Where did everyone go?”
“Skrake got ’em,” Maeve says, almost with satisfaction, and I feel myself get a little colder even in the hotness of the day.
Mam sighs. “The skrake, love, everyone was trying to get away from them.”
“That and the hunger,” Maeve says. “Men can do terrible things, Orpen. Don’t forget that.”
This is new.
“Men?”
Maeve tips her head. “Men made the skrake, long ago.”
“By accident,” Mam puts in, and Maeve nods again.
“They did terrible things then and they do terrible things now.”
“How do you know?”
“Know what, little warrior?” says Mam.
“That men made the skrake and that men are still doing terrible things.”
Mam and Maeve glance at each other and neither one answers, so I go back to the thing I want to know most.
“How many people are left?”
“Whisht, child, do your weeding now.”
Time passes, and I’m thinking about something else completely when Mam says, “We don’t know, Orpen. We don’t know how many people are left. We’re the only ones on the island, anyway, and we know there are some people left in Ireland, but nobody knows about anywhere else.”
“We don’t know that,” Maeve says. “We don’t know there’s anyone left on the mainland.”
“But we should look,” I tell them, and my voice sounds young in my own ears even.
Mam and Maeve look at each other, and then Maeve says, “Good idea, Orpen. Muireann and me will take you to the mainland, and we’ll introduce you to some nice skrake.”
I’ve nothing to say back to her, and I know she’s only trying to make me afraid, and I am, so I stay quiet.