No Corners - A. Joseph Black

My father Eddie told a story once...actually, he told many stories, and most of them more than once, but he knew the true storyteller's trick of keeping your strongest stories for best. And so I can only ever remember him telling this particular story once. 

For his entire adult life Eddie was a lighthouse keeper. His brothers, of whom there were many, were all priests, and it was an enduring family conundrum how Eddie had come to such an unusual calling. Unsurprisingly, it formed the basis of a good number of his brothers' sermons down the years, with John 1:5 in particular being worn threadbare (“God is light; in him there is no darkness at all”). 

When he was home on shore, Eddie’s brothers would probe him gently on his solitary life, so much more like their own than they seemed to realise.

"What is it......like?" they'd ask. "On the lighthouse?"  "No corners," he'd reply, a little ungraciously perhaps, with a conspiratorial wink to me as they pursed their lips and returned to their scalding tea. 

The story took place when he was stationed at An Truscar, off Wexford. An Truscar was known as one of the most punishing commissions in the service, five miles offshore (then). Seven men had died in its construction, Eddie reported with a relish implicitly sanctioned by the hundred years since passed. 

It was a balmy August evening when he found the first dead turtle. Turtles weren't unknown in the area, but they were uncommon, and it was the first time Eddie had found one washed ashore, alive or dead. He didn't have to wait as long for the second, which appeared the next day, along with the third and fourth. The third day there was half a dozen. Unsure of what to do with them, he removed the shells and burned the carcasses, using the same paraffin oil he used to power the lighthouse. 

But the bodies continued to wash up, twenty a day by the end of the week, and the burning of them was becoming increasingly impractical. That Saturday night, as he retired to bed with the smell of seared turtle flesh smarting his eyes and nose, Eddie resolved to contact the Commissioner for guidance. 

In the event that proved unnecessary, as in the early hours he was woken by a sound he described as unlike any he'd ever heard before. Like thunder, he said, but louder, and longer, and deeper - so deep he could feel his stomach vibrate and his teeth rattle. Accompanying this deafening sound was another, one which bewildered and terrified him in equal measure. It was the sound of water, to which he had of course become well attuned down the years. But this was not the sound of water lapping or lashing the rock on which the lighthouse stood: this was the sound of water rushing around and past the rock. And that made no sense. 

Running, tripping, falling down the spiral staircase Eddie raced to confirm what he didn't want to believe: the lighthouse was moving. 

He burst out through the front door, and what he saw left him struggling for his breath. The lighthouse and the rock on which it stood - all three acres and God alone knows how many tonnes - were gliding serenely through the water, away from the already distant shore. Like a comedy drunk, the wind and spray whipping his face, Eddie closed his eyes and rubbed them violently, so violently that on reopening them he had lost focus. As form and substance returned to the scene before him he realised that the rock and lighthouse were actually borne aloft above the water. Crouching low, his fingertips pressed to the rock, he sidestepped to the nearest edge of An Truscar and looked over.

Ahead, in the direction in which they were travelling, he could see a black mass breaking the water. It wasn't another rock. It had a form, and a shape, and a movement he immediately recognised as being that of the head of a turtle. The rock, the lighthouse, and Eddie were travelling on the back of an enormous turtle. After perhaps twenty minutes - although it may have been two and it may have been fifty, he freely admitted - their pace slowed and An Truscar descended, not without grace, to meet the rising waters below and come to a gentle halt. 

The turtle carved a giant elegant arc through the water in front of him as it turned to swim back and past him before disappearing beneath the black waters. 

Eddie never saw another turtle, never told how he explained to the Commissioner how his lighthouse had moved four miles, and never told the story again after that one time. It was, after all, one of his best.

Originally published by The Incubator, 2015

A.Joseph Black is from Carnlough, Ireland and writes short stories and flash fictions. Over thirty of his pieces can be found online, in literary magazines, and in print anthologies. He was runner up in the Colm Tóibín International Short Story Award in 2018 and 2021 and his stories By the Lake (2016) and Nora (2019)were published as chapbooks in Australia. His short story A Little Cloud was The Irish Times New Irish Writing for January 2020 and in 2022 he won the Arts Council Northern Ireland/Writers & Artists UK “Finding Your Voice” competition.