The Memory Basket

The sea was a constant hum beneath her thoughts. Even now, as the tide pulled in, Maeve stood at the edge of the rocks, her skirt whipped by the wind, a wicker basket pressed against her hip. The air was sharp with salt and seaweed the kind that burned your lungs clean and left your lips chapped. Below, the waves licked the stones, each retreat leaving a glimmer of foam that looked, for an instant, like the lace at her hem.

Inside the basket lay the fish...or what the people of Ballycarra called fish. Caught not from the sea, but born from memory.

Maeve was the Keeper of Fish, a title passed down through the women of her family line - from her grandmother, to Mother Eileen, and finally, to her. The reason the job was so important, at least why her family believed it was so important, was because in Ballycarra, like most Irish villages, no one spoke of grief. They swallowed it, carried it, or hid it beneath their tongues until it was too much to bear. And when that weight became too much, they came to Maeve.

She never knew when, but when they came, she would walk with each villager to the well. There, she’d take their hand, listen, and breathe their sorrow until she could feel the shape of it. Then, she’d whisper the memory, as softly as she could, into the water.

The well never refused. It swallowed every sorrow, dark and bottomless.

At the start of each season, Maeve would cast her net through the wells depths. And it always came up heavy. Not with muck, but with fish. Memories taken from the soul and spun into scales. They shimmered faintly, each carrying the light of a memory no longer wanted. Some were pale as milk glass, the ache of wounds long healed. Others glowed crimson or indigo, pulsing like small hearts....grief that refused to fade.

Maeve never kept the fish with her long. It wasn’t good for the soul to cradle what others had cast away. Her task was to send each sorrow home, letting the tide bear it into the wide unknown. The wide forgetting.

Through the turning of seasons, she gathered them. She noticed patterns with the memories. Springs thaw brought memories of things buried and reborn; summer’s heat crafted restless thoughts. Autumn’s catches were often morning chances lost, and winter’s of people lost.

Now, at year’s end, her basket was the heaviest she remembered.

The wind blew heavy and low through the dunes that morning. Maeve thought, as she had many winters before, that this was the right kind of weather for letting go. She walked to the cliff’s edge, shawl tight, basket heavy with the weight of what felt like a hundred hearts.

From Niamh, the midwife, came a small, pale fish...the memory of a child who never drew breath. From young Eamon, the Smith’s son, a flickering silver one, restless with shame. From Father Ronan, a fish dark as sut...a sin whispered once and never again.

One by one, she lifted them from the basket, spoke their names into the wind, and let them fall into the sea. Each struck the water with a sound, almost like a sigh, and then vanished beneath the waves. The fish swam free.

When she reached for the last fish, sometime felt different. This one was smaller than the others...and copper-colored, its eyes started into hers. She had never seen one like this.

Gently, she cupped it in her palms. Then, as it blinked, she saw the reflection of a face within its eye...it was faint but she was certain. It was Liam's face in the fishes eye.

Liam’s.

Her breath caught. The name rose to her lips before she could stop it.

Liam. The boy with dark curls who had danced her in circles in the churchyard, who carved her name into driftwood and left it by the harbor for luck. She’d been seventeen when she met Liam. She was sure the world would bend for their love. Because of its strength and her certainty in it. But, just after summer, he’d left in the night for Galway. No explanation, no goodbye. Maeve was heartbroken. It was the day she swore off men forever. Word came later that he’d drowned in a ship that had gone down off Dingle.

Maeve had learned not to ask questions about the ship or what he was doing on it... she knew that the sea took what it wanted.

But the fish trembled in her hands, and she knew...this was his memory. And just like he had, she had to let his memory go.

How did this get here she wondered. Somewhere...maybe far from Ballycarra, maybe long ago. Maybe Liam had stood before another well.

The seagulls screeched overhead, and suddenly the wind tugged at her hair. But Maeve, transfixed on the fish, only heard only the tune he used to hum....the one about the sailor’s girl who waited by the rocks until her hair turned white. The fish’s copper glow flickered and she could tell the fish was dying.

She should release it. That was the way of things. People weren’t meant to hold what had already been forgotten.

She paused. But why should she? Hadn't she spent her life carrying what others cast away?

Maeve knelt in the sand. “Ah, Liam,” she whispered, her voice trembling like the tide. “What is this memory?" The fish laid lifeless.

“You were the only thing I never wanted to forget,” she said. The words fell easily, too easily, and she felt how true they were. Her life had been built on tending others’ sorrows while her own remained untouched. Waiting, perhaps, for something that had long since drifted away.

Maeve looked toward the horizon, where the sky kissed the sea. Somewhere beyond that gray veil lay the place he’d lived and died. She could almost see him...young again, smiling shyly, the scar above his eyebrow from falling out of the apple tree behind her house.

She rose.

“All right, love,” she murmured. “I’ll let you go.”

She waded into the surf until the cold crept from her toes through her entire body. She was knee deep when she finally opened her palms. The fish slipped free, darting toward the dark. For an instant, two lights shimmered beneath the waves. His memory and hers. Fading together into the same current.

Maeve stood long after, the tide tugging at her feet. Behind her, the village lights glowed faint through the fog. The basket lay empty.

Tomorrow, she would return to the well. There would be new memories to gather, new griefs to set free. But tonight, she had none left of her own.

She turned once more to the sea. The rain had begun to fall, soft and steady.

The sea, she thought, was not only a thing that took. It was a thing that gave back.

And somewhere in its endless dark, a copper flash moved with the current. A lost love, finally at peace.