Moor Liath

In yellow rubber boots sausaged thick with mud, Aileen walked over the moor. Cautious as a lamb – two spindly legs, two biscuity knees, downy hair and pale skin yarned with blue veins – she stepped around pockets of soft peat: miniature bogs that would suck her down and keep her, holding her prisoner among the bracken and the moss. She had always felt safe on the moors. Her baby-bird coloring and gauzy heart were amulets against misplacement.

As she walked she watched her feet; when she looked up it was to assess the topography of her childhood. Scalps of violet heather, crowberry bush, cotton-grass, mud. It was mossy and wild, thick-haunted with ghosts. She smiled. Slushy wind slapped her pale cheeks.

Then: a bruised vista of murk rose before her, like a huge dirty window pane. It was a cavalry of what looked like ghosts but didn't smell or sound like them, didn't dither and tarry the way the dead did.

Aileen shivered. Her flannel coat, green and scratchy as pine, suddenly felt like gauze.

There was nothing strange on the moors. Fog was mythical: everyone knew that.

But it was the wrong time of day for ghosts. Usually they rolled in in the morning, on wagons of gray, in packs of twelve, twenty, a hundred, more. They would hover over the heaths in lilac clouds like drying linens on clotheslines; they would leave their smells (black tea, wet straw, dirty hair, tobacco) clinging to the scrub and dampening the shale. They would bicker and chide and hum sweet melodies, or blare bawdy drinking songs. Once, Aileen's mother told her, kindly, that the ghosts of her grandparents probably hadn’t joined the contingent that shushed around their moors; that they would have gone back to Galway and Kilcoo to brume and float above the cities they had been born in. But Aileen could often smell her grandmother's minty hand salve and the dinner breath of her grandfather – whiskey, potatoes, barely-chewed mutton – when the ghosts billowed through Liath, so perhaps sometimes they visited.

The sun had risen and burned away most of the morning specters like oil in a skillet, but an alien haze was settling over the sprigged purplish heath. It was thicker than ghosts, fusty and fibrous – a blanket pulled from longtime storage. Uncombed, beard-whiskered, like it would scratch Aileen if she touched it.

Aileen had never believed in Fog. It was all urban legend – a cryptid thing like Nessie or nymphs or aos sí in their fairy mounds. Older kids told stories about Fog as though it were something that could live under your bed; something with cold insubstantial fingers that twirled, serpentine, around your neck and took you away to a mute, fishbelly-white place where nothing spoke and nothing shined. They said Fog would covet her because she was colored the same and never talked much. Blue-white like seafoam. Quiet as dust. The nastier ones implied that Aileen – chalky and sparse – had been born from it and ought to return.

It was all fable, a horse’s tail. Aileen tsked, emboldened by the recollection of smaller children so gullible to believe it. A brick of cloud descending on the world, thick as a snowstorm, wet as a rag? A smothering amoeba of warm damp air that did not whisper to you as you walked through it or emboss the land beneath it with the scents and the sounds of the dead, dropped like loose change?

"Ráiméis," she muttered to herself, and carried on.

Aileen walked forward, and forward again, pressing with her toes and the oyster-flesh undersides of her wrists against the boundaries of the thing as though testing the heat of the milk in a baby’s bottle. The mist did not scald her.

She pressed on, deeper into it, needing to identify this newcomer, its peculiarities.

Sometimes new bands of ghosts – freshly dead or blown by foreign winds – would come to her family's land. Shy as ewes, ornery as hogs, neither-nor. Her parents said they must show hospitality to these phantasmal pioneers, which mostly meant talking to them in soft reassuring tones, complimentary and finely-lined. Aileen never liked the new smells and the new voices of these spirits at first, but eventually a spittle-thin bond would be drawn between them, and she could be civil.

This mist felt different – newcomers always did: gritty like sand or soft like the hair on her father's knuckles or chunked like porridge.

This felt like emptiness.

Nose and throat filled with the mossy phlegm of moor air, Aileen said hello.

" ," the new air said back.

"Welcome to our moor," Aileen tried next.

" ," the air replied.

Aileen’s tongue felt shriveled. She had never known a mute ghost before, let alone a flock of them. Again she shivered, down to her muddied boots. She felt the mindlessness of the air on her pastel cheeks.

"Don't be afraid," she told the hushed maybe-ghosts. "It's alright, please don't be afraid."

Around her, the damp exhalations of the earth bandied. She raised her hand and brought it swiftly down again. A swill of air – a typhoon, a whirlpool, smoke in a flue or something meteorological that could suck her down and away. The air was so white that when she held up her palm before her face she could not see it. It was like her eyes had been painted over – she was irisless, a Grecian bust.

But the silence was the worst. Ghosts carried catchphrases like purses along from their lives. In the stories, Fog was displacement – losing track of your feet, of your footsteps. It gave no directions; it told no tales. Aileen felt suddenly sick.

" ," the Fog around her said, over and over again. " , , ."

Aileen swallowed. She could not see her cottage anymore.

You are lost, it said. You are l o s t l o s t l o s t in the F o g F o g F o g. 

The air began smelling like sweet cream and the inside of old Wellies.

Aileen was swallowed.