Mairead Fagan

Morecambe Bay 2004

Go at low tide. Wear the rubber boots you’ve been given, though they pinch your toes sore, blister your heels. Scan the rippled sand, hard packed; scattered silver when the wind whips wild. Look for dimples, depressions, where red-legged oystercatchers lurk. Let the weight of your rake drop; let it bite, and scrape.

Don’t think about the mountains of home; the deep green dew-sparkled by lifting mist. Don’t think about clear streams winking mischief in the sun as you fished with your brother, your feet bare, mud-streaked.

Stay spine-bent and low; hear the clack against metal tine and scoop with your freezing fingers. Pluck the striped shell and wipe off the grit before you drop it in your netted sack. You must fill it to the top. Cockle by cockle.

Don’t think about your mother’s words. That the sea is many coloured; deep jade and blue, quartz tipped, like an ever-changing sky, and it whispers soft secrets to the sand. You know now, she lied. The sea is leaden and churning. It roars. 

Work until dark. Lick the salt rime from your cracked lips, and long for numbness to blunt the sting, to smooth the strain of muscle stretched raw against aching bones. Rake, scrape, dig. Fill the sack cockle by cockle, cockle by cockle. 

Don’t think about your brother groaning pale in the ship’s belly. Don’t remember the sweat-stink air, a baby’s wail as you rose and fell, the engine’s throb as your brother clung, gaunt-eyed, to your arm. He was gone by morning. The baby, too, silent by the time rusty doors clanged open to the searing light. Container to truck, to a stained mattress in a cramped room; you slept and slept, ’til they woke you.   

Pay no heed to the rising tide lapping like a tongue at your boots, your knees, your thighs. Think only of the bright coins your half-sack of cockles will bring. Stand and squint through the night at where the headland might be. Wade through the starless dark; it can’t be far.

Don’t think of your mother’s faraway eyes as she spoke of the west being a golden chalice of glimmering cities, of books and chances away from that steep-stacked village of uncles and aunts, of cousins and sisters, and brothers.

Wade. The pewter sea curls round your chest, your neck, bites at your chin. The cockle sack, tugged from your fist, sinks fast as you feel yourself lift, as you flail, try to swim. Fight the suck, the pull.

Don’t think about what’s gone. The sure-foot paths. Your brother.

Close your eyes, and remember your mother; she told you the truth. Let yourself float into deep jade and green, let it hold you, as she did. It’s an ever-changing sky, a soft embrace. Hear it whisper its secrets; of mountains, of fields, of home. 

Mairead Fagan teaches and writes in the South West, UK. She won the Bath Flash Fiction Award in February 2024, and her flash stories have been published in a variety of literary journals such as Crow and Cross Keys, The Molotov Cocktail, The Propelling Pencil, and WestWord. She is currently procrastinating over a novel and sporadically tweets @judasspoon

Read more from Mairead:

Here on Trash Cat Lit – ‘Orcas’