The banshee is quiet. I’m half choking on the night, the darkness a cloying in my throat, the utter blackness a pressure on my rheumy eyeballs. The quilt is too heavy. The soft pillow muffles my ears. I fidget my deathly cold feet. She will come, I think. The scream will pierce the silence that is barely a silence at all. I can hear the moan of the wind. A branch of the old hawthorn scratch-scratch-scratching. My own blood a subtle roaring in my head. I lay a crooked hand on my chest and feel the fluttering of my heart. I’m waiting for the thump-thump-thump of it to ebb away. For my breathing to slow and stutter and wheeze to a stop. It must be now. But not before the banshee screams.
I am the last. No babies ever bloomed in my womb and now there is no one to listen for the spectral wailing. I have heard it many times: my father, my mother, my uncle. All dead. All screeched into oblivion. It is my turn now. I can feel it; a slowing, a settling, an uncanny knowledge that there is no tomorrow left. Tick-tick-tick, my pulse is counting the seconds. She does not make a sound. I think I know why.
I am the last. The end of the ancestral line. What happens to a banshee when there is no one left to scream for? What happens to an old woman’s body when no one knows she’s dead? I cannot think of such things. And neither should she. Release me, old friend. Sing and shriek and screech me away. My heart flutters. My breathing slows.
Still, the night is silent.
Ellen Forkin is a chronically ill artist, writer and poet living in windswept Orkney. She’s passionate about all things folklore, myth and magic and especially loves writing tiny stories on these subjects. Visit her website at www.ellenforkin.co.uk.
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