Ballinrobe

For a short while time was inert. Ballinrobe appeared as a sequence of sepia photographs. The stolid landscapes were blackened by the absence of dysfunction. The town had proved defective under the pandemonium of Phytophthora infestans. Thereupon, as was the convention of the time, Ballinrobe manufactured a variation of itself; industrial Darwinism. Silhouetted against the wan shadow cast across the horizon, the obscure impressions of St Mary’s were discernible. The timeworn indentations were ever more palpable as the eye roamed up the spine of the church; being where the brickwork was set against the pinkish twilight sky. The dissipating yellow sun was barely at sea level, ideally positioned to set ablaze the adjacent cemetery.
Heaped earth towered above the laurel green stems. As natives, they laboured the unrelenting gusts, voyaging cross-county with aggregate vigour. Distorted monuments surged from the steeped ground. Dust leapt and spiralled in the evening current, diving from the mount into the narrow sea that severed tomb from tomb. Beneath the packed soil the three blind settled amongst the insensate throng, circumscribed by rosewood fortifications. The unrelenting scientific starkness of death devoured the amorous and anarchistic trials with which human existence is so rarely gifted, and bountifully tore from them pink flesh and wisps of auburn hair.