It’s almost dark.
Women of different ages await the arrival of someone who’ll take them. While waiting, they talk to the stones with eyes that bear the widowhood of days. I’ve seen them all my life. Away from the stones, close to the sea. In the days when striped beach huts were hired, picnic lunches and folding chairs were taken to the sand and the children were learning to swim in the sea, well away, golden little dots appearing in the tides.

To speak so low no one can hear, to write so small no one can read, to empty my ears and my eyes so that I’ll be found gone into the ground I walk on. My absent self, buying porcelain houses for my mother.

It was my mother who taught me to fear vagrant things or the injustice of stones’ lives – so lifeless! Stray animals that die on the roadside – no: they die on the road, I don’t know who moves them to the side, but that’s where they’re found – a cat, eyes open, one eye hanging out still attached to its cavity – will it see better now, its eye touching the ground? Mother tells me not to look at it; neither me nor the lifeless life of stones’ injustice.

Dead birds’ bones as relics of saints: I’d wear them if they brought me good luck. And if asked whose bones I boasted around my neck, I’d reply they belong to the most polluting saints of this land no longer inhabited by seagulls alone.