Cormac McCarthy is a man living in Sligo, Co. Sligo, Ireland. He is largely unknown/a myth to those living near him. He wakes now at 5 a.m. and peeks through the blind at the blind leagues outside. He is the only one living here, so he believes, the only one who is truly awake in this world. There are no people outside the window of this place that he lives in now, so he feels that it is a good time to leave and go outside now. Now. Not tomorrow. Never again will there be a time like this one.
Outside, it is Sligo town. The town is yet to wake. The Winter months have left this set of bleak weather and dark skies as a commonplace expectation. It is dark and it is wet now. This is the county town, and it constitutes about 30% of the county’s full population. There is a rich history in this place of shells and shellfish, but richer is the scene happening now on the roof of the Dunnes.
Two seagulls meet here now and argue about who shall take the soaked box of takeaway chicken left smushed here. How a takeaway container found its way onto the roof of a Dunnes is beyond reason, but it’s likely that a third gull was carrying it home to her children, when it slipped from her claws and before she had time to retrieve it, she was swallowed by the turbines of a landing aircraft to the local airport.
The gulls settled to have a 1-1 brawl for who receives the takeaway mash. The distinguish them, one gull has a smarting of bird shit on his right wing and will be named as the stained gull. The other, with pristine wings will be listed as the clear gull.
But now Cormac McCarthy is scaling the fence at the rear of his property, and as he drops down to the grass below, he snags the large sack he is holding on a thorned bush. He curses and undoes his jacket to wrap around the large black sack, so that none of its contents will spill out. He has a way to go before he can part with the sack so he must tread carefully.
Now, standing back up with sack in both hands, he seeks out the hidden path in the wood which he knows will lead him to the dumping place. Cormac’s sack is bound for there. This, if it were observed by the other residents in the district would be viewed as strange, as it is known that Cormac does use his refuse and recycling bins frequently. During a recent storm which ravaged the petite coastal vista, his bins were shaken by the wind, and being only halfway filled, caused the contents to spill out into the road. Empty tins of cat food, cutlery and broken power tools fell out of the bins into the road. Many other bins also knocked too, however, so it was impossible to know how much of the waste really belonged to Cormac. A district-wide cleanup was set up. Cormac did not participate.
Now, as he treaded along the path he had been forming for months, in anticipation of this day, tears fell out of his eyelids. He squinted into the black. Of course, it is obvious that there was a corpse in his sack. His small pussens had fallen ill months back and its death was inevitable. He had tried everything.
The gulls commenced their brawl. Both fought well, and though it was still very early in the morning, with the sun not even rising, both shone like flames dancing. The stained gull caused a subtle turning point in the battle, wherein his wing nicked the breast of the clear gull. This in turn caused the clear gull to be stained with her own blood. Panic spread through the clear gull’s mind seeing this, and fear of also being stained and not being able to tell each other apart caused another, stronger wave of fear to capsize any kinship between the two gulls up to this point. She made a daring leap forward and in one swift motion plucked with her beak the eyes of the stained gull, blinding him. She immediately realized the fault of her ways and even though it could be reasoned that she had won the duel, she settled that it was only right that the blinded gull receives the portion of food, as it was blind now and would forever find hardship in searching for food. Upon looking around, however, she noted that the takeaway had vanished, in truth it had been swallowed by a black crow some minutes beforehand. Not wanting the stained gull to starve however, she fed him his eyes back, communicating that this was the very takeaway they had fought over. She then lay down as the stained gull continued to feed on her spilled blood. The sun gradually sunk into the dark sky.
Cormac McCarthy lay his little pussens to rest at last. She was presoaked in lighter fluid and dripped on the rubbish-filled wastescape that was this place. The Garvoge river trailed softly somewhere in the background. The dead kitten smoldered up with the fallen match. Cormac knelt and bent his head to the flame saying a prayer, at which point the tongue of flame caught his head hair and took him down to meet his cat in the swift heaven which was to be. A group of small children intent on skipping school that day witnessed all of this but were too shocked still to intervene.
And so, the last conscious of Cormac was Amen to his lost cat, and he followed its bright flaming form into unknown heavens below.
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