Claire Gleeson

“They are not here, her children. Not anymore. She finds them elsewhere sometimes. In the first smiles of her baby son, and the way his hair curls after a bath. They are in the high teenage voices of other children; girls the age her daughter would be now, with their gossamer clothing and their eyes lined in black uncertain rings. Her son, she finds sometimes in the gangs passing home from the primary school at the end of the road. The shove and snigger of them. The new unchildlike smell. And sometimes she sees them in her own face as she stares into the mirror after a night of broken milk-downed sleep, and counts the new lines around her eyes.
And she supposes, they are with Tom too. And she hopes that this is a solace and not a haunting.”
― Claire Gleeson, Show Me Where It Hurts