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FREE NINE FOLDS MAKE A PAPER SWAN PDF Ruth Gilligan | 336 pages | 07 Jul 2016 | ATLANTIC BOOKS | 9781782398578 | English | London, United Kingdom Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan by Ruth Gilligan | World Literature Today Or even white with terror up on the shul balcony the day of my bar mitzvah—the day I stopped speaking and this whole mess began. Each night I savored the image, the single thing that kept me going these days. Only, the longer I stared at it the less it looked like my Ima at all, the face distorted with time and doubt and fear until, really, it was nothing more than an approximation, an estimate. I had never really been the outdoorsy type—my hands much too far away to coordinate with my eyes—so the sweat of the crawl alone was a killer. But with the added terror of being caught, my chest was relentless—needed a few blanks of my own to calm the bloody thing down. I paused to pant. The stones were digging into my kneecaps, a vicious impale like a gnashy set of teeth. But I carried on despite myself, dragging my body under the ledge, my face so close to the dirt my nose might scrape a rut that looked like the trail of a snail. Or like an un-bar mitzvah-ed mute off to meet an old Jewish cripple for Tuesday afternoon story time? I rolled my eyes but they saw only mud. I remembered Alf once told me it was better to be buried on your front, to make sure you were a gonner, like. Of course, Alf himself never seemed to bother with any of this cloak-and-dagger shite; always just wheeled into our meetings from round the front of the house, casual as you like, as if the whole thing were above board. To be honest, I half suspected Sister Frances just sneaked him out, then covered up his tracks, the pretty nun still caught on some daft bit of softness for the grouch. We had managed a couple of get-togethers a week out here in a forgotten part of the garden—about all that was feasible, given the constant vigilance of the place. And apart from the hectic schedule, there was the added restriction that Alf refused to meet on Friday evenings or Saturdays, always surprisingly strict in that regard. When I arrived I wiped the clumps off my knees and began to yank at the rocks in the corner until, finally, I had uncovered the Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan I needed. The jotter was the same as the ones we had had at school. A dull, piss-yellow color; a sketch of a Martello Tower on the front, as if to encourage every gobshite in the country to become the next James bloody Joyce. I opened the book and took out the pen that had been wedged in against the spine. The ink was already running low—Alf would have Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan nick us another one soon. Or how about getting one of those quills like that Rabbi Loew lad we learned about in cheder? Apparently he would just dip the nib of it in ink, close his eyes, and let the words come down from above; Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan out predictions about the massacre of the Jews until, unbelievably, the things came true. And maybe if I had that quill I could do the opposite now—write down what I saw and somehow make it untrue again, and then speak. His regulation shirt had been buttoned the wrong way up, his slacks at least two sizes too big so that his leg stumps were absolutely swimming in them. Or maybe it should have been drowning. From what I could gauge the Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan ran out just at the knee, which was kind of ironic given my own slacks had been lopped off exactly there, my shins permanently exposed to the world. It had been four days ago, that smear of poetry. Four days and how many years? How many lifetimes? I just wanted. With one palm beneath the jotter I clenched my fingers round the pen. Muck dropped from my nails, little pips like a fall of extra punctuation. Or, really, like a dot dot dot for everything I knew was about to come. The story itself was just a love story, once you got to grips with it, though that was easier said than done. It had all started on Clanbrassil Street in Apparently the country had been absolutely ravaged by fuel shortages courtesy of the war going on in Europe. But there was something. Made me feel. And he told me about how they had clicked instantly, himself and herself, working side by side in the trenches of peat. And she had a fine way with the spade, let me tell you, Shmendrick. Not exactly spring chickens the pair of us, but we made decent progress so we did, going deeper and deeper into the dirt. Because to be honest, I had never heard love quite like it; never known it could exist between a man and a woman. No, I thought that kind of infatuation was reserved only for mothers and sons; for Imas and Shems. The day was already fading around us, a decent gust getting up that set the weeds to dance. Smashing stuff, like. By the end of each session Alf tended to be knackered, his memory a muscle overused, but before we headed back he would shut his own eyes and hold out his hands for the book. I would pass it over, then watch as he clasped it to his chest and rocked from side to side. And when Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan handed it back the jotter would still be warm as I stashed it beneath the bricks of the ruined shed, piling them high before I moved away, slowly. Though I always went in reverse; always careful not to turn my back; a reverence and a respect for the words. Once inside Montague House again, it was business as usual. As merciless. To be Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan, if anything Alf had become even more cruel than before, using the humiliation to cover up any whiff of our cahoots:. While Sister Monica smiled on in sinister approval. In the comfort of that silence I could have sworn something different had begun to form between us, a fresh reek Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan the pantry air. So for a while, the new bond was almost enough—the unfurl of the story and the secret routine brightening the dull of the days. Every installment was a new distraction, a bit of unlikely warmth to keep me going, like the fuzz that had started growing back on the top of my slappy little head. My Ima. Or more precisely, I could almost trick my mind into other things—divert it down to other bogs—whereas my body refused to have any of it, the separation turning physical now as well. My bowels were in bits, a rainbow Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan squirts every time I grazed the toilet bowl. My appetite was annihilated. So instead I would find myself just sitting there in the canteen, hunching over my plate, remembering. The echo of her voice would fill me, the gorgeous countryside lilt. I knew she had grown up on a farm, though she never really liked to talk about it. The other women all craved cheese when they were expecting, or sometimes even pickles. I remembered it now word for word, one of her favorite boasts, massaging both our egos with her spindly little hands. But me, oh no, I was different—I was after getting Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan cravings! Word pangs! Every time I Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan one I would have to find a rhyme. And I knew then, pet, that you would be a different kind of baby. A very special kind. Other times I would remember the year I had gone through a strict phase of only eating my food in alphabetical order:. Spelled out on a plate that only she and I understood. We would giggle like gobshites, gone on it for hours, until Abba would bang his fist down on the table and scream at us to stop. Or there was this one time, a year after my bar mitzvah, when I caught my mother crying in the kitchen. But it only seemed to make her blub even harder, the joke somehow lost in the telling. Ruth Gilligan is a novelist, journalist, and academic from Ireland, currently living in London. Skip to content Created with Sketch. Created with Sketch. Search for:. Facebook Twitter Instagram. Sign up for our newsletter Enter Email. Privacy Policy. I love you. I strongly like you. I, strongly similar to you. I, with large muscles. So close to being lost altogether. And get out of here. And see my Ima. I tilted the Martello Tower so he could see: From the first time I saw her I plied her with questions, needing to know every bit. Until they needed fuel; needed volunteers to come and dig turf from a bog. And this time round, he had taken me with him. Like a pair of wings tucked in. I stared at the ground. It almost felt as if I was intruding on a moment. I knew you were special from the moment I was pregnant.

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