Short story: The Oyster Catchers

Beth Tyrell is the 2014 winner of RTÉ’s Francis MacManus Short Story Competition. Read her winning entry here.

I HAVE seen in winter the black rustling airborne mass of a murmuration, and on TV the slick quick silver stream of small fish, clouds of individual anchovies turning as one. And thought – we are all together in this world, this is how we move, this is the shape of us. But it was only a thought and it did not connect to me.

All week the world was weird. On the Monday school run the trees rose grey against the grey sky, the delicate lace of their empty crowns holding air. Like helium balloons they tugged gently upwards through the cold river mist. I thought of their roots, as wet and sinuous as eels in the waterlogged earth, slipping, slipping, easing into the upwards pull so that soon they would release their hold and lift solomnly into the sky; slow the way that trees are slow. I saw them float straight upwards in the stillness of the frozen morning.