such was the stillness, I heard the bells from Knock Shrine sneak right up to our front door.

I was wearing just knickers because of the heat and no shoes, the crumbling lane powdered on my feet.

"Don't dawdle, " she said.

iiI passed the bald earth that falls into the bank where the stream was allowed to be.

I watched the wall grow on the high side of the ditch and over it I saw the hollow filled with weeds, nettles and things, the trees beyond on Maloney's land.

iiiThe white handkerchiefs were like veils over their rosy foreheads, stomachs wet and stuck underneath dirty shirts and the way they called the fields by name. . .

I listened to their voices add hunger to the sandwiches, saw the small bottle of whiskey they passed around.

They laughed about the colour of my hair, the experience of sun on skin and how a combine harvester could chew a little girl. .

this murder. . .

by Aoife Casby this murder was a defining moment, a bank robbery doesn't contain the same dynamic from a dark womb when they showed pictures of Neil Armstrong in his stride, if I could have blown bubbles into embryonic fluids I would've filled them with questions like who held the camera when Dave O'Leary stepped up to the ball and thousands of us said fuck no, Mrs Kelly in Castle Street was praying and a young girl, you know her, well, in a cold doorway someone was telling her, "Shh, this is our secret."

and once we sucked in the clean air on the Dyke Road, when the sun got so crazy that, like a dawn at night we could see green northern light in irish skies and Mehmet Ali Agca shot the pope, Diana wasn't driving, the ground moved seven inches in horizontal shaking during The Great Hanshin earthquake, on a Tuesday and when they killed the fork-lift driver I was fast asleep in bed.