Hollow Tide

One grey morning the sea off Inis Bán pulls back further than anyone alive has seen it go. Where the water should be there are stone walls, a chapel, and a street of roofless houses.

Seamus is seventy-four. He walks out across the wet sand to the house his family left the night the old village flooded, and he has maybe four hours before the tide comes back. He has brought nothing with him and he is not looking for anything. He only wants to stand in the room where his mother refused, for the rest of her life, to answer one particular question.