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Étaín
By: Jack Laddish

On the weekends, between pub shifts and commissions, Étaín takes a train three towns down to the hamlet of Gorm-on-Rye, pays the dockman nine euros for his morning sail and ale, then rides the drunk’s boat to the island she bought during uni.

This morning, he overcharges her. “That’s another fifty cents, love.”

Étaín counts out the coins again, twists her cigarette in her lips, and scowls. “It’s never been before.”

“Times are changing.” He coughs and holds his wrinkled hand closer to her. Closer. She regrets leaving the buttons of her jacket open. Dockman—he has no other name—coughs globs of white seafoam spit and Étaín drops the coin in his hand. His hand stays stretched out. His eyes are trained somewhere private.

Étaín drops her leather shoulder bag on the dock. “How clumsy.” She stares at it and the old man’s pride takes over.

“Allow me.” He bends at three different places. She listens to his bones crackle with nasty glee.

Dockman hands her the bag. “You’ve too much paint in there.”

“I’m a painter.”

“Ain’t so good for your shoulders. You need a massage.”

“Shut up, Dockman.”

The old man leers.

She climbs into his old dinghy where her bag nearly slips over the edge. The seat for passengers is at the back, coated in salt and peeling fiberglass, and Étaín is wearing thick canvas trousers in preparation. She flicks the fag stub into the water.

“Off we go!” rasps Dockman as the engine chugs up to a gallop.

Every weekend, Étaín considers buying her own boat, but is also reasonably confident in her ability to kick the old bastard in the nads if he gets too out of hand. He’s better at steering than she would be. Maybe she could make a kayak, out of reeds or something. She’d have to find reeds.

They hit a wave and Étaín gets her last shower for the next thirty-six hours. The constant salt air makes her hair grow to twice the size each weekend.

“Lookin’ pale,” Dockman comments. He turns to eye her. “Need some more protein in your diet. Eat some red meat.”

“I’ll fuckin’ eat you.”

“Ha!” He turns back to the sea. “Bet you would."

Her island is in sight now.

It’s not much of an island. There’s a couple small trees and a ramshackle half-a-house and a pump left over from whenever the island had fresh water. She’s got some old stuff potted in the basement now. Every couple of weeks, she pays the dockman extra so she can cart the giant jugs to the mainland and back to replenish them.

Maybe buying the island had been a bad choice, like her friends had said, but there’s something about having land that opened a part of herself that would have stayed closed forever, even if it is a ratty old patch of land. It's hers and hers alone, where she can simply exist with her paintings and liberty without all of Dublin crowding round her shoulders. She knows she ought to take better care of it but every time she frees herself from the city and comes to visit, the urge to abandon her humanity and paint like a madwoman overwhelms her, so the house remains in tatters.

“Your kingdom,” the old man says, and slows down the dinghy as they approach the jagged rocks.

Étaín takes a moment to pull up her trouser legs and tie them with the ribbons she’s sewn in. The water is grey and holding something awful and Lovecraftian, she’s sure. The seafoam catches in streaks on the side of the boat like a horse's mane, and she notes it down for her current project.

Her duck boots do little to keep the water from her socks as she vaults over the side, but at least most of her body stays dry. She heaves her heavy bag of supplies around to her shoulder and slogs off through the rocks.

“You’re a creepy little one, you know!” the dockman calls behind her. “Like a ghoulie!”

She spins around, flips him double birds, and turns back just in time to stride right into a boulder. It fights back and sends her sprawling onto her knees.

“Christ!” A mouthful of pure salt slides down her throat and the slight stability she’d caught flies from under her palms. Étaín crashes into the foamy gray, her head slams against the boulder, and she blacks out for a second.

She shoots up, spluttering and scraped, with two ears and two eyes full of hateful Irish water and her shoulder bag wide open. “Christ, Christ!” She drops to her knees again, fingers trawling, but nothing reunites with her searching hands out of the abyss of twenty centimeters. “Fucking hell!”

Étaín decides to sit down right there because she’s already soaked and acting like standing up is going to make her less wet is a downright lie, and Étaín doesn’t like lying. Right now, she doesn’t like much of anything. Her bag is bare, she’s sodden through and through, and when she glances over her shoulder, Dockman is speeding away.

No painting for the rest of the weekend. No nothing. She can work on the house, but she’s shit at houses. She isn’t even sure where her hammer is, or what she needs to do next. Its ruined state is perpetual, with just enough shelter for her stove, bed, and work.

Oh, work. Endeavor, occupation. To take the creatures in her head, extricate them like a neurosurgeon, and pin them to the page. It's cheaper than talking to a shrink anyway, and sometimes people enjoy her demons enough to buy them. She's been dealing with a particularly troubling unnamed horse recently. Horses, not houses. She can't get the legs right.

Her ma calls Étaín’s work unhealthy. Her boss doesn’t like it either, not when she doodles on the notepad instead of using it for orders, or when he finds her tracing strange creatures with the ash from a dangling cigarette on the back patio during her breaks.

And painting is what brings her to the island each weekend. It's a hypnotic studio made of broken limestone and dying grass. The thought of a weekend without her work transfixes her to the spot.

No matter. She needed a break from her current equine fixation. It can sort out its own kinks. No matter.

No matter?

People spend weekends alone all the time. She can enjoy nature—the two trees—or go for a swim—this water is freezing.

Étaín stands up, knees trembling, bleeding from the palms like a modern-day saint, and stumbles towards her godforsaken island.

It takes about an hour for the jitters to get into her hands. She decides to cook a nice breakfast and opens a can of beans. The lighter won’t light—it was in her trouser pocket.

The nice thing about owning your own island is that no one cares if you run about with just your pants and undershirt on because the only person who might see you is the old man who already stares at you like you’re naked all the time, anyway, and you don't care if he thinks you're some kind of crazy witch.

Rubbing her head leaves blood flakes on her hand. She blows them into the wind like eyelashes. She's given this island her money, her time, her blood. The least it could do is give something back, for how much she's passed to it.

After the cold beans are gone, she adds the can to her pile, which keeps growing. Morphing. A demon horse, legs everywhere. Coming alive—

Étaín washes her fork, has a nice drink of water, and goes to lie in the sun. Her island is usually so cold but today it'll be hot enough to fry an egg on the tin roof. At least it’s a quiet island. The ambient noise from little Gorm-on-Rye is nonexistent.

It’s a free universe and Étaín likes to sprawl. Her laundry hangs on the clothesline above and her socks are like two little sails on a blue-sky sea, free to leave the island if they so wish. If she had an island somewhere as warm as this all the time, she’d make sure it was a larger one. It’s okay to be trapped on half an acre when it’s usually cold because it adds to the artistic gloom but if it was tropical, she’d have cabin fever. She needs somewhere to prowl, to run.

Maybe she really is part lion, like her mother calls her, with her brown-blonde bush of hair. She could roar. She does, the sound screeching from her throat and startling a gull. Étaín laughs, rolls over, and contemplates whether she’s been stabbed or if it’s just a burr in her side.

Or maybe she’s part owl, with the dark circles beneath her eyes, her affinity for sleepless nights, and the uncanny ability to turn her head too far back. Her pa calls her an owl, and her ma calls her a lion but either way, she’s all human, and humans were made for something like this.

When her grandparents had sold off the old family farm and moved to the city, little Étaín had watched some part of her grandmother die early, some part that had been rooted in the soil. When big Étaín had seen the island advertisement, she'd passed by and been hit with the guilt from a thousand dead. The land is a pain to care for, and maybe she’s been without the fix-it motivation for the last year, but a half-acre is enough for a lion-owl-girl to rule and far better than a Dublin flat. Selling the island would be like shooting a broken-boned horse that's become her own left leg. For all she rails and wails at it, the land is hers now.

Her hands are shaking again, but no one would be able to notice, because she’s pressing them into the earth to keep steady.

If there’s nothing left to do, then perhaps it’s finally a weekend of caring. She could weed, mend the missing wall, sand down the rusted pump. The sun makes her lethargic even as she tries to muster up the motivation a landowner needs.

She needs a cigarette, harsh, sudden, and springs up to grab the jacket flapping in the breeze. The box she pulls out is more like a sea cucumber than a pack of Marlboros. Hunched over her precious cardboard, Étaín sorts through the fags and finds them all wrecked. The box crunches into a small ball in her hand and she chucks it over the shallow cliff. It lands with little ado in the sandbar below.

Neither of her two fixes can get to her. The sun berates and Étaín watches her doom approach.

She finds the hammer shortly after. The water jugs feel like they’ll last her out the weekend, but she’s not sure if the canned food will. Dockman felt more than just paint in her bag and now the tuna-canned fish have returned to their sea. She salutes them, mourns her stomach, and is searching through the stove for charcoal to draw with before she remembers the front box is for show and the stove burns gas.

This is worse than paleolithic. They had fire. They had meat. Étaín has an island she spent her grandparental inheritance on and not one pencil within arm’s reach.

Étaín sketches out a monster in the unfinished floorboards with her fingernail until a splinter lodges. It's the festering horse, the one she can't name, can't get right. Étaín usually paints things with too many tails and horns and fur, like the kid from that old book Where The Wild Things Are if he had too much time and writhing spirit on his hands. She likes to name them all like a kid with her teddies.

She lifts the hammer. It’s a solid metal head on an old wooden handle. She could probably kill a vampire or a person with it.

With the pointed side meant to remove nails, she carves a rudimentary horse's leg into the floorboard. The leg joints break and bend like the limestone boulders off the shore. “That’s not so bad,” she murmurs. It’s almost convincing.

Her heart is fluttering too hard for only a morning’s withdrawal from nicotine and art, and she feels it in her bloodied scalp. Perhaps she’ll go to sleep right now. Napping at nine in the morning is nothing—she’d slept through every mathematics final she’d ever taken. Just like then, the tension builds—and now her lungs are too empty and too full—

Étaín screams, smashes the hammer straight through the boards, and rushes out of the house.

Her breath is coming heavily, each inhale carrying stifling salt with it, and everything is slowly growing to be too much to handle. Her hair has dried into stiff clumps. Even in only her pants and undershirt, it still feels like there’s too much touching her skin. She’s far from pure, but right now, she craves a purified body where she could float forever, touching nothing at all.

Étaín sits on the grass, pretends it’s a down mattress, and passes out.

She comes to with a roaring headache.

That explains the morning, alright. It’s hard to sleep off a drunken night if the most you allow yourself is a half hour at dawn. Now, with the sun too strong to see and herself stiffer than a log, Étaín has caught up with the decisions she makes for her art and is hung over at high noon like an American cowboy.

When she tries to get up, her skin aches, and she realizes something worse. When she tries to speak, all that comes out is a Dockman rasp, and then everything erupts in fire because when you’re pale as a ghost and take a wee kip under a rising June sun from the devil, you wake up to something left of heatstroke.

After another two attempts, Étaín rises to her feet, finds her way into the house, and glugs down water from the basement jug. Then she stands, admires her horrific new tan lines, and tries to decide whether to drown herself in the ocean.

As she sits on the edge of her house by the missing wall, next to where she’d really gone and smashed the hammer right through the floorboards, Étaín sees the horse for the first time.

It’s standing at the bottom of the little field and staring at her with both eyes in front, which is unnerving when a person does it but baseline terrifying from a horse. It seems like it would like to eat her.

When the horse takes a step closer, Étaín notices that one of its legs is bent in the wrong direction and checks the hammer-sketched leg she’d made. The lines match up.

When she glances up, the horse is standing right in front of her, staring down its long white nose like a prey animal is never supposed to. The horse grins and Étaín remembers the saying but looks it in the teeth anyway. Lucky that she does, because the chompers are stained red and pointed, and the horse has a bit of something stuck between them. Then its lips wriggle and widen, and Étaín seriously thinks about drowning herself when the horse starts talking.

“See, right there, a bit of tendon, I think. The dude was stringy, you know?”

She picks up the hammer.

“He wouldn’t stop yelling either, but that’s what I always say, and that's all I'm sayin', right? You got it. If they're going to tie me up off this island, put me somewhere with a good plate of hay, or I'm gonna put these gnashers to good use. It's a good set, I've got. Got 'em at a bargain.”

The horse closes its mouth and looks at her frontways, then turns its head and looks at her with a strained sideways stare. The brown eyes roll exposing the yellowed whites.

“Could you get to it, then?” It’s looking at her with some kind of intent.

“Get to what?”

It grins again. “The tendon. Stuck.”

“Oh, right, sure.” Étaín puts down the hammer, reaches into the presented mouth, and picks the meaty tendon out from between the fangs. “Got it.”

The horse’s huge tongue runs around its teeth and moistens them up. “Hell yeah, you got it. I owe you one.” Could the universe cock and aim a little quicker? She needs it. Yes, right between her eyes, thank you.

“Come here often?” asks the horse.

Étaín stands up. From her elevated open floor plan standpoint, she’s got a head or two over the horse. “I own here.” The elevation makes her head throb harder.

“Mm. I talked to the old ones and they said I could have it a long, long time ago. Maybe they said I could eat ya.”

“You can’t eat—what? Who?”

“Can I eat your grass?” The horse has swung away already. “If you really don’t want to be eaten.”

Bewildered hammer back in bewildered hand, she shrugs a shoulder. “All yours, mate.”

“Gracias.” The horse moves off a bit, pulls up a plug, and chomps down. “You buildin’?” it asks with a full mouth. It nods to her hammer.

“Yes. I guess.” Even her palm is sunburnt. It hurts to hold the hammer with her fingers bent. She needs to see a doctor, but she still can’t get away from the island until Sunday evening, preplanned with Dockman. “I don’t really know how.”

“I could help.”

“Really?”

“Nah, man, I don’t have arms. I’ll watch.”

“But I said I don’t—”

“Hop to it.”

Étaín hops to it because when demon horses tell her to fix a cabin, she doesn’t hesitate.

The horse with blood in its teeth won’t stop talking. Every once and a while, the chatter dims, and that’s how Étaín knows it’s found another rusty nail and is trying to pick its own teeth. She keeps getting its leftover nails dropped beside her in a pile with fleshy bits hanging off. The horse is still nameless, with each moment driving in the thought that maybe she doesn't get to claim this creature. Not like that.

“Old ones said I'm just here to make sure you don’t die, really. I talk to them all about you. I like your portraits of me. Brings out the hellfire. You paint real good when you’re out on my island."

“You’re just a bit of my imagination, then.”

“Either it's that way or this way. One of us exists, and if it’s you then I’m in your brain, and if it’s me then I’ve gone crazier than ever.” It’s come over next to her again. "Come on, keep moving, this is work, just like painting and bleeding."

The more she looks at it, the less sure she is that it really is a horse, because of the eyes and the teeth. Normally, the monsters she paints start without anything definable and she parses out the legs and horns and narrows them down to specifics. This horse started as a horse and got worse.

Étaín is losing feeling in her hands. The hammer has gotten heavier and she’s starting to forget what the point of nailing the board to the support beam beside the field is, until the horse nudges her arm, and she keeps swinging.

“You stop and think, it’s a weird world, but if you leave your head empty maybe it’s just a nice day. Look at the trees, branched out, and the water’s gone blue now. Think it tastes like blue raspberry?”

Étaín sits back on her heels for a moment and looks down the sloping island towards the trees and the water. “I guess it’s rather lovely. Not so cold, after all.”

“Socks like little sails, yeah? You thought so. And an island to yourself. Nothing you’ve gotta do out here, but you still like to. Girl, you’ve got it made.”

She’s running through the issues in her body and laying them all out and it isn’t helping her come up with a method of survival. There’s nicotine withdrawal, and the hangover, then the jitters in her hands, her entire body burning like a baked potato, and smashing her head on a rock.

The horse nudges her arm again. “Keep it moving. Don't fall asleep.” She tries to hammer the nail in the last centimeter but hits something too solid. “That’s a stud,” the horse says, and grins.

Étaín doesn’t have the patience. “I need a hospital, I think,” she tells it.

Instead of sympathy, she gets a faceful of sea mist from the horse’s maw. “Healing as all hospitals combined. Breath of an each-uisce.”

That catches her attention. “You’re an actual each-uisce?”

“You thought a normal horse looks this good? Each-uisce all the way, baby, at least in your words, rightful ruler of tricksters, liars, this island, the sea, all horsekind. I’ve got magic in my bones. And boater in my teeth. Urgh.” It coughs. Horses aren’t meant to cough like that.

Before Étaín can begin to process the opening, she catches the last bit. “You ate the dockman?”

“I've been sayin’ it. Only, not his liver.”

She throws up right over her folded knees, beans and old whiskey splattering the dirt. Then she coughs, like a human is meant to, and stands up. “That’s my only way off this island, you ass.”

“What?” The horse stands up too. “Nah, not with him, anymore. You're going a bit each-uisce yourself, running and mad, out between the sea and itself. You’re gonna have to swim.”

“I amn't swimmin’ this bloody English Channel!” She casts her eyes over the large gap between her island and Gorm-on-Rye, stable on the cliffy mainland. “I’d fuckin’ drown!”

“It’s swim or die. Yeah, old ones told me that, yeah, they did. Swim. Off you go. Cool down.” The horse nudges her towards the water.

“I amn't swimmin’!”

The horse sits back on its haunches like a dog. “It’s a more interesting death.”

“I amn't dyin' by drowning.”

“Yeah, you said that.” The horse lies down again and leans over, nudging into Étaín. “Fine. Don't die. Stop working. Take a break.”

Étaín’s hand, far from the nail, is still twitching with the hammer grasped. “You’re the one who told me to work.”

“And I’m sayin’ now, go take a lie down and soak up some water. Time is comin’ for us both, now. Waves beating down a shore and all that.”

With the changeable horse helping her along, Étaín makes it down the sloping field. She twists back. "Where are we going?"

The horse skitters down the little cliff to the shore in a way only hooved things can as Étaín uses its neck as a rail to keep herself upright. Just before the bottom, she collapses onto the horse completely with her fingers tangled in its mane. Far more gently than ever before, it kneels into the surf that flows over the ground at their feet. “You people drive yourselves crazy, don't you? But now you’ve learned to take a break."

Étaín falls into the sand and instantly, the cold water soaks up to her skin and rains down from the breaking waves. It's a kiss from a god—a blessing from the earth. It gives her a moment of clarity. "Why are you helping me?"

"You care about the land, just this random piece out here. Least I can do is care a bit back. Helping you help yourself, and all. Since you still won't let me eat you."

Her headache has spread down her neck, down her spine, and her fingers have all moved from shaky to numb. There’s something awfully wrong. "You didn't eat me, then. You just made me live."

"You're not in the city anymore, gal," the horse says, but quieter. "You've bled on this land. You love it, and loving’s as much work as bleeding or hammering. You love it here, even without naming the feeling or the place. Can't be eaten by the land if you're part of it again. Take a breath, now, keep on breathing."

There's not enough left in Étaín to manage comprehension. She's sinking into the sand, draining out of her own head.

“What’s your name?” she raises.

“Horse,” it says.

“Oh,” she says, and wakes up.

Someone is carrying her through a world of darkness. Every piece of her body burns.

“How long did you say she’s been out here?”

“Dropped her off yest’day mornin’ around eight. Saw her fall, but I didn’t think she’d hit her head like that.”

“Right.”

Étaín rolls over and realizes she’s not being carried in arms, but by a floating bed. At least one of the voices is Dockman. Maybe both. Maybe he has three heads, ten arms, and is taking her away to be eaten.

Étaín wakes up again and realizes she’s in a stretcher, heading to a boat with flashing lights, with Dockman nowhere in sight. His voice scratches through a radio pinned to the chest of the torso floating above her, which is carrying one end of the stretcher. "Ol' girl’s a painter, see."

“Severe concussion, heatstroke, and sunburns,” someone else says. A woman. “We need to get her into the city.”

“She’s awake,” says the male torso over her. “Can you hear me?”

Étaín squints. She tries to say something but opening her mouth tears through a scab of blood and old skin and she's overwhelmed with the taste of salty iron.

“We’ve got you,” says the woman. “Bloody awful weekend you’ve had.”

“D'you know how long you were lying in the sun?” asks the other EMT.

“What’s your name?” grills the woman.

They’ve made it down to the beach, and Étaín hears the sway of a creaking boat and feels the ocean's each-uisce spittle fall over her forehead. A glob of drool rolls to her cheek, taking a scabby bit of lip along with it. Étaín groans a sentence out and the man leans over to hear.

“Come again?” he asks.

Étaín sits up, blood in her teeth, and stares just past the woman to the galloping whitecapped waves. The braying and stomping, bucking and running, all the oceanic movement her island can take. That’s all there is to it, really. The land can stand on its own misjointed legs but it’s still on her to hold it steady.

The salt bites. The wind nickers. “Sometimes I’m Étaín,” she rasps, “and sometimes I’m the horse.”